Carving a niche for himself

Sculptor Brother Joseph McNally left a remarkable legacy to his adoptive country, reports Dominic Coylein Singapore

Hidden in the annals of the National College of Art and Design is the name of Joseph McNally. A graduate in the early 1950s, he hosted a solo exhibition of his painting in Brown Thomas department store in Dublin. Then he disappeared from the Irish arts scene.

But while he may have faded from Ireland's artistic memory, McNally did not abandon art. Already a De La Salle brother and missionary while at college, he later returned to Singapore and Malaysia, where he was to exert an influence in his field as profound as that of many of the college's other illustrious alumni.

Born Johnnie McNally in Ballintubber, Co Mayo, he first travelled east in the wake of the second World War. He was a teacher first and foremost and, in those reconstruction years, that required much of his energy.

The Catholic Church provided as much as 20 per cent of the school places in Singapore at the time. It served all faiths in a country where Catholicism was and is a minority creed. Crucially for McNally in later years, the Catholic schools attracted many who would later form the political and economic elite - half the current cabinet is Catholic-educated, although only two are Catholic themselves.

The De La Salle order was dominant among the educators in Singapore and Malaysia, and the Irish provided the backbone of that presence. McNally took his place in this missionary structure, but one thing set him apart: his belief in the importance of arts education.

At a time when the arts would have been a low educational priority generally - and more so in Singapore and Malaysia, which were struggling to recover from the ravages of war - he fought to place them in the core curriculum, believing them to be crucial to children's development.

During his teaching years, he continued working as an artist, although pressure of time curbed his output. When he retired as principal of St Patrick's secondary school in Singapore in 1982, he turned his attention full time to the arts.

His doctoral thesis at Columbia University in 1972 had been on creating an arts college in Malaysia, where he was then posted. With time on his hands, boundless energy, a paltry sum from his retirement gratuity and a dream, he threw himself into the creation of such a college in Singapore.

As former pupil and current cabinet minister George Yeo remembers, he undertook this work "almost single handedly and against tremendous odds".

"When he embarked on this project, many thought he was being reckless. At the time, the government did not consider the arts to be important or deserving of state funding," says Yeo. "He took on more and more financial obligations - running up debts of millions of Singaporean dollars - which alarmed his fellow brothers."

At the time, Yeo was Singapore's first minister for information, communications and the arts. "I worried a lot for him. He had to be bailed out many times," he says. "He would always say 'God will provide', but there were all the rest of us scampering on the side, making sure God did provide."

All the time, La Salle College of the Arts - or St Patrick's Arts Centre, as it was first called - was growing, attracting more students and offering a wider range of courses. It outgrew its original premises, borrowed classrooms in St Patrick's School, but had to wait 10 years for a home of its own.

In 1992, the government provided premises at a former secondary school and, a year later, Singapore Airlines came in with funding of 15 million Singaporean dollars, wiping out McNally's debts and allowing the building of new accommodation.

Renamed La Salle-Sia College of the Arts - Sia stands for Singapore Airlines - the college's new premises, better teaching facilities and funding allowed it to negotiate for recognition of its courses, and the first degrees were awarded in 1993.

Ten years on, the college now accommodates 1,400 students and is on the move again, this time to purpose-built premises in downtown Singapore, where the government is trying to create an artistic quarter. The new college buildings will be complete in 2006.

In 1997, with the college's future finally secure, McNally retired once more, finally finding time to concentrate on his own work and on further raising the profile of the arts in Singapore, where he had taken citizenship and had been awarded state honours.

He lived to see the arts take a more central place in Singaporean society. Having spent much of its 38 years of independence struggling to build a sound economy, the state felt the arts would have a role in creating the entrepreneurial culture needed to develop as a knowledge-based economy.

"From when he started till now, it is less than 20 years, but he brought the college from what was only the seed of an idea into a full-fledged tree which will grow and bear fruit," says Yeo. "Quite remarkable."

Artistically, McNally had moved from painting to sculpture as his preferred medium, working with a range of materials and being especially interested in the fusion of wood, glass and metal. His output in his last years was prodigious and, apart from those pieces on permanent display in Singapore, Malaysia, Ireland, Australia and the US, the De La Salle brothers also hold some of his work.

There is some irony in the fact that the man whom they once feared might bring financial calamity upon them by building up massive debts in creating La Salle-Sia College of the Arts will now contribute to the well-being of the order through the sale of these works.

It is almost 50 years since McNally exhibited in Brown Thomas, but through the efforts of Brendan Lyons, the former ambassador to Singapore, an exhibition of 34 of his works is on display in the atrium of the Office of Public Works, on St Stephen's Green in Dublin. McNally didn't live to see his work return home, though he knew it was coming and had viewed the exhibition space last summer. Instead, it fell to Yeo to open the show during a visit to Ireland last week. The works reflect many of the themes central to McNally's life: his Irish roots caught both in his use of Irish bog oak and of Celtic imagery; the rich colour of his Asian experience; his love of people, nature and education; and, of course, the spirituality at the core.

Back in Singapore, in a corner of McNally's untidy studio at La Salle-Sia, pieces of bog oak transported from home stand in silent testament to a man whose tireless energy saw him achieve his artistic dreams and, in the process, leave a rich heritage to his adopted country, which is now seeking to encourage the individualism that will take it forward. "He played a seminal role in arts education. He dived in where angels feared to tread," recalls Yeo.

Speaking in a documentary filmed shortly before he died, last August, McNally said: "I would like to be remembered as an educator, both as an educator in the classroom, as a principal of a school and as an educator through the arts. I would see myself really as an educator first and last."

Brother Joseph McNally: An Invitation To Nature is at the Office of Public Works, St Stephen's Green, Dublin until April 20th