Siobhán is a visual artist living in Cork City. She works across several mediums, including pencil, charcoal, watercolour and oils. Her work foregrounds play, materiality and embodiment. Her drawings and paintings are primarily figurative and explorative. She enjoys the act of making as a process of discovery, closely observing a living subject by searching for its gestural essence.

Her aim is to dig deep and create new visual narratives that reflect both the personal and the universal, providing fresh, complex and challenging interpretations of familiar genres, including portraiture. Her focus is on connection, direct observation, memory and art history. With a background in Fashion, English Literature, Philosophy and Fine Art, she brings a unique and multilayered perspective to her work.

During her time in TRISKEL SAMPLE Project Space, Siobhán will do a practice-based research residency in contemporary portraiture. She will engage the public by drawing and painting the faces of people living in Cork. She will create approximately 40 portraits over the course of 4 weeks, make space for critical reflection, and partake in an artist talk during her solo exhibition.

The portrait studies will vary in duration from 15 minutes to 2 hours. Time limits will determine the level of detail, some works will be largely gestural, others more resolved. She will use a mix of wet and dry mediums. All the drawings and paintings will be on the same size paper (A3) and displayed in a manner that allows equal focus on each portrait. Siobhán will invite people from the community to sit for a free portrait. She is committed to the inclusive potential of the project, and in ensuring the dignity of each participant.

The process of creating a portrait from life is complex and challenging. Her project will pursue an enquiry into the reciprocity and exchange that takes place between artist and sitter during a life portrait. There will be no erasing, just searching lines and marks, from which an essence of the person will emerge.

It is as profound an experience to draw another person as it is to sit for a drawing. She will reflect on how the portraits are a reflection of herself, and how much she is affected by the sitter, the space, and the audience. Her exhibition will conclude with an artist talk. Siobhán will chat with fellow artist and Sample-Studios member Éadaoin Glynn about the experience and take questions from the audience.

Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.

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