About

Sonia Shiel’s paintings explore our relationship to the natural world, one another, and ourselves - in surreal and subjective narratives, set as close to survival as they are to extinction. Inhabiting the edges of both, Shiel’s shape-shifting scenes describe environmental, ontological, art historical, and personal chaos. Sheets of painted canvas are tailored into free-standing traversable shape, with confronting botanical, seismic, and creaturely characteristics. As pageant, polyptych, terrain, glove, or portal, Shiel’s hyper-objects bear sentient qualities, generate performative elements, and often create opportunities for engagement by conspiring with the body as a site of encounter.

In adapting the myth of Medusa, a story of misrepresentation and disputed agency, the exhibition’s central looping narrative explores its own evolution from disembodiment to full constitution. In Sonia Shiel’s exhibition, Medusa in Pieces, landscape appears to possess multi-dimensional capacity, including transposition, restoration, disembodiment, and prediction. See: VISUAL. In other solo exhibitions : I Am What You’ve Come To See, at Void, Derry – the artworks collude with the viewer through a series of automated and magical actions; Rectangle Squared, at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork – an artist is presented with an opportunity to make something important amid absurd procedural impositions; and The Incomplete Platypus, at Rua Red, Dublin – an artist’s studio is shared with a passing rock, that marks time and knows no bounds.