Sonia Shiel
(b.1975) lives and works in Dublin.
Whether painting, sculpture, audio or video, Sonia Shiel’s work explores its protagonists’ attempts to survive the odds of nature and the laws of their own creation, in scenarios that reflect back the processes of art- and promise-making as something the same. Within that, it explores its own artifice and the propensity of ‘art’ to be effective in the real world. Her works conjure surreal encounters between fictional characters and the illusory world around them as they struggle with what to say and how to be heard, with what they see and how to describe it, with what they want to make and how to achieve it, and to be better understood. Many of her works engage with each other symbiotically or con/sequentially within mixed-media installations, creating narrative sequences that share the central materiality of paint throughout. Their acmes are often achieved with mechanical, gravitational or trompe-l’œil tricks. While her video-works synthesise object, image and sound with hand-painted animation, performance and model-making. Sculptures pose or whistle; paintings are cast as life-size characters, objects, terrains, and as whole traversable landscapes; and low-tech special-effects cause the work to breathe, fall or climb, as if ‘inhabiting’ the space. Other collusions lead the viewer further into the tale with painted-on footprints scaled to induce distance; altered weights speeding-up and slowing-down time; or instructive and choreographic texts in legal, various or poetic form that consolidate a notional sequence of events.
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Links to previous shows;
Here, While the Bees are Sleeping, 30 April – 30 May 2015
Group Exhibition – Instant Crush, July 4 – August 2 2014
Selective Perspectives, Group Show, 30 May – 27 June 2013
The Human Race – 12 January – 11 February 2012
Group Show – Preview 2012, 20 December 2011 – 6 January 2012