Louise Walsh

Louise Walsh (born 1963) is an Irish artist from County Cork. She was a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design. She is known for her many public artworks which are located in Belfast, Limerick, Dublin and at London's Heathrow Airport.

Life Walsh's 1992 work, Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, Belfast.

Walsh was born in Cork in 1963. She attended Crawford Municipal School of Art and graduated with a Distinction in 1985. In 1986 she gained her MA in Sculpture from the University of Ulster, Belfast. She had worked in the Sculpture Department at National College of Art and Design, Dublin from 1996 - 2022.

In 2013 she walked away from the project due to the financial loss she had sustained during the process.

Monument to the unknown woman worker In the late 1980s, her design for a public artwork in Belfast to commemorate women's work was accepted by the project's selection panel. The official brief was to reflect Amelia Street's history as a former red-light district. with "two colourful life-size ‘cartoon’ female figures’’. Walsh considered it to be offensive to portray women in that way, and instead submitted her proposal for two bronze female figures, addressing the underlying issues of women's low-paid jobs and unpaid housework. This theme is articulated by the use of objects and utensils symbolic of women's work, such as household items, telephones, shopping baskets and cash registers, which are embedded in the fabric of the figures. Due to the controversy regarding its purpose it was dropped by the selection panel. A private developer later recommissioned the work, titled Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, and it was erected in 1992.