DABF | Reading: Artists as Writers

Saturday 12 November 2016 | 2.30pm - 3.30pm
Main Gallery | TBG+S
Free admission, all welcome.

This year the Dublin Art Book Fair focuses on the production of text and celebrates ‘Artists as Writers’, centering on the interrelationships between the visual arts and writing. With an introduction by Francis Halsall, this afternoon event features readings by Irish artists Sonia Shiel, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty.​

Sonia Shiel will read from a selection of her texts; scripts, short-stories and plays that are central to her current project, as part of the UCD Parity Studios' Artist-in-Residence program. It involves the development and materialisation of dove-tailing short-stories and theatrical sequences into a new body of work, bound by the aesthetics and rudiments of 'a play'. Whether painting, sculpture, audio or video, Sonia Shiel explores her protagonists' attempts to survive the odds of nature and the laws of their own creation, in scenarios that reflect back the processes of art-making. Within that, her work explores its own artifice and the propensity of ‘art’ to be effective in the real world, conjuring surreal encounters between fictional characters and the illusory world around them. Shiel's video-works synthesise object, image and sound with hand-painted animation, voice-over 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.

Wound with a Tear serves as a document of Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty's 2014 project in Trinity College Dublin, curated by Michael Hill. The book, made in collaboration with Hill, investigates the ongoing deterioration and renewal of the institution's archives, its buildings and their inhabitants. Interdepartmental Memoranda guides the reader through this Wildean romance, and photographs taken around the campus that highlight the growth, decay, patterning, chaos, dust, mould, and the expanse of knowledge embedded within this historical setting. In July 2016, a copy of this publication was accepted into the Trinity College Art Collection.

Jane Lives has contributed the title page illustration and typography with synopsis courtesy of Michael Hill via www.100yrsagotoday.com

Biographies
Sonia Shiel has exhibited at The Crawford Gallery, Cork; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC, Cork; Rua Red, Dublin; ISCP, New York; The Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin; and The Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin, among others. In 2014, Sonia Shiel received the Arts Council's Project Award, with which she completed the Art & Law Fellowship Program, at Fordham Law School, while participating on the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. In 2015, she was Artist-in-Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and received Arts Council Visual Artists Bursary 2015. She has been the recipient of many competitive awards including the (HIAP) Helsinki International Artist-in-residence; Culture Ireland and Arts Council funding; the Centre Culturel Irlandais Award; the TBG+S Frankfurt Exchange Program; Banff Centre for the Arts, Leighton Residency Award, Canada; the Hennessy Craig Award (RHA); The Tony O'Malley Award; and TBG&S Membership Residency, among others. Her works are in public and private collections including the Arts Council of Ireland and the Office of Public Works. She is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin and has upcoming exhibitions in New York, Dublin and Beijing.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty have been working together since 2010 and use performance, video, sound, installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process to convey visions of transience and resistance. Through mimetic acts of communication and repetition, of resurrection and preservation, they interrogate humanity’s struggle against overwhelming natural forces and ask how we can look beyond our limited perception of endurance. Recently they were awarded the Arts Council 16 x 16: Next Generation bursary. The 16 x 16: Next Generation bursaries are awarded to innovative young artists, in a special initiative of the Arts Council and the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme, in recognition of the role of artists in the events of 1916.