Sioban Piercy

     
Sioban Piercy
Centre for Creative Arts and Media, Galway Mayo Institute of Technology.
siobhan.piercy@gmit.ie
www.siobanpiercy.co.uk


Biography

Sioban Piercy completed her MA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London, receiving four of the college’s awards for her degree show. She also won the British School at Rome scholarship that same year. Since then her work has received recognition nationally and internationally via numerous exhibitions and awards such as ‘E.V.A.’ Limerick, the International Print Triennial in Krakow, Poland and the Printmakers Council of Britain. Her drawings, books and prints are in major collections throughout the world including L’Insituto Internationale Per La Grafica, Rome and the Irish Arts Council. She lives in Athenry, Co. Galway, Ireland. At present she is Head of Fine Art Printmaking at the Centre for Creative Arts and Media, Galway Mayo Institute of Technology

Exhibition / Open Book

‘Foreign Bodies’
I work with disparate printmaking processes and technologies as well as photography, digital imaging and various ways of drawing- and place them in a three dimensional framework. I also use the interplay of word and image. For the most part I have been situating these concerns in the form of a book or books but also I have created free standing sculptural objects.
If a sculptural object is called ‘a book’, it positions the work in a very specific context; within the traditions, associations and expectations of what we normally understand a book to be.
Those expectations include narrative, meaning, knowledge, wisdom, truth or propaganda, ideas, vision or alternative worlds among other things.
As Garett Stewart says in his writing ‘Bookworks’-

‘In the gallery rather than a library, books are subsumed to the kind of metaphors in which
their pages so often trade’.

By embracing a diverse range of graphic resources, from the digital and photographic, to the hand made and expressive, and placing them within the same context, tensions are created and exposed that are both perceptual and psychological. The three dimensional framework of the two dimensional images generates a further destabilising challenge to the viewer as the geometric logic of the sculptural form contradicts the illusions within the printed and drawn images.
Different types of ‘readings’ are provoked. I am interested in the metaphorical possibilities that the interfacing of these assorted visual graphic languages engender. In my work these interactions propose unstable narratives that are thereby visually, verbally and emotively constructed. They uncover and speak about our underlining ontological insecurities and our strategies for contending with them.