About

Sonia Shiel is an Irish visual artist, based in Dublin. Her intricate paintings of the sublime reveal a shape-shifting landscape, in which near-sentient storms, and other unruly phenomena are the type of tangible things people might climb to, or tether. When multi-dimensional, Shiel’s paintings form traversable terrains, maintain a studied self-reflexivity, and consolidate performative installations that use audio-visual, prop, and text based elements to orientate the audience. On stepping in to one of Shiel’s narrative loops, the viewer too confronts the uncanny - in a folie a deux, bound by physical circumstance and a narrative momentum, that thrashes through form and façade to explore creative agency, authenticity, and free-will.

In Sonia Shiel’s current exhibition, Medusa in Pieces at VISUAL / Centre for Contemporary Art, landscape appears to possess multi-dimensional capacity, including transposition, restoration, disembodiment, and prediction. This body of work has been developed through a series of generative events in the areas of archeo-gaming, performance, and fiction, that culminated in its sister work Supernatural Bureau, curated by Kate Strain, at Kunstverein Aughrim, in collaboration with Benjamin Hanussek, gaming researcher; Anne Bogart, theatre director; and Elvia Wilk, author of Death By Landscape.

The legacy of these events is retained in the exhibition’s materiality. Composed of interchangeable wooden slats, the paintings possess mutable properties of other things and is inhabited from time to time by a number of natural elements including lunar tides; seeds; and a pulse, all of which defy their 2-dimensional origins. 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 through various technical performances.

In recent 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. Group exhibitions include The Glucksman, Cork; The Lexicon, Dublin; The Cable Factory, Helsinki; Kulturbunker, Frankfurt; and IMMA, Dublin, among others. Sonia Shiel is a member of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. She is a Fellow of Fordham’s Art and Law Program, and an associate artist at UCD’s School of Drama.