"I'm over the moon," she said. Business to Arts enables and supports creative partnerships between business and the arts, and the awards celebrate successful, exciting collaborations. The black-tie awards ceremony is June 17.

The sculpture Alva created that was short-listed for the prize is a six-foot oyster that sits in the Beacon Hospital in Sandyford, Dublin. Alva made the piece from bronze and crystal. "That's what I usually do," she said. "I combine materials, whatever suits the project." A large, crystal pearl sits in the middle, and Alva also crafted the large "rock" on which it is mounted.

"I had never worked with those materials combined before," she said. "But it's excellent to move forward with your work." She is also working on smaller versions of the theme.

Alva is currently exhibiting work in Beijing and Shanghai as part of the "Is Mise Ireland" exhibition of contemporary Irish art from March through August, run in conjunction with the Beijing Olympics. And she was invited by The National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, to be among those representing Ireland in European Glass Context '08 in Bornholm, Denmark, from August through October. She has also been invited to exhibit from June 19 through September at The Hallward Gallery in Merrion Square, Dublin.

National College of Art

Asked what drew her to sculpture Alva said, "I never know how to answer that. I just think it's in you. I couldn't imagine doing anything else." She studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and also studied glass sculpture in Seattle, Washington.

Alva loves the challenges glass offers. "Painting and print are fine but learning completely new techniques – like casting bronze and glass – just gives you a new technical awareness," Alva said. "Glass is such a difficult medium to work with. You have to be very, very careful."
At the same time, she said, "It's a beautiful medium – with its transparency you get fabulous effects." Alva has a furnace and kiln at her Cavan workshop and casts big pieces with the Dublin Art Foundry.

Though originally from Killybegs, where she keeps a studio, she moved to Cavan, in part, for its central location.

"Travelling with big, glass pieces in your jeep on those Donegal roads," she said, letting the listener finish the thought. "So I got a map and went to the middle." She hopes to be in Donegal this summer for the Earagail Arts Festival.

But though she doesn't live in Killybegs, she is still influenced by the coastal images of her home place. On her web site, Alva said her childhood revolved around the sea. "I learnt to dive at a very young age and adore the solitude and sense of calm I experience in the depths of the water," she said. "The characteristics of the ocean continually inspire me, particularly its unpredictability and perpetual rhythm."
She said she uses pieces of glass to create suspended images that describe "the fragility of life."

Alva captured that sense of fragility when she said her art invites "the viewer to peer into their depths. Thus exposing what lies in the darkest realm of the ocean. A ghost ship, aging, growing, decaying and becoming more beautiful in time without ever being disturbed. An object that was once so familiar is tragically made alien and never to be seen or touched again."

And though she has left the west coast, she has not left the water. Alva said she spends a good deal of time around Belfast, fly fishing. "I'm a fishing maniac," she said, though she clarified that. "I'm more the rower."

But she loves to watch a talented fly fisherman. "It's such a skill," Alva said. "When you see the guys at it who can get the full reel emptied completely, to the other end of the lake."

She doesn't exhibit her print work much, but she has prints on exhibit in the China show, and will show large-scale glass sculptures in Dublin. It is glass she is showing in Denmark as well, and Alva just recently sent some very, very carefully packed pieces to Bornholm.

In the past year she has also exhibited her work at the 126th Royal Ulster Academy of Art in Belfast, the annual King House Exhibition in Boyle, and at the prestigious La Galerie SEMA in Paris, in an exhibition opened by the Irish Ambassador to France and reviewed by Le Monde.

While she continues to be influenced by the sea she doesn't rule out other sources for future inspiration.

"I just keep the ideas and can always come back to them," she said. "There's a lifetime to do it."

More information on Alva and her work is available at the web site www.alvagallagher.com