Alistair Wilson, who was born in Wales, came to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, after a period in London. For the better part of 30 years, he managed two careers–as a sculptor and as a lecturer in sculpture at the Belfast College of Art.
Forging Histories of Past and Present: A Conversation with Mariana Castillo Deball
Mariana Castillo Deball works with a range of materials and processes bearing a strong relationship to archaeology and history. Her transformative approach and deep visual understanding result in rich and resonant works that merge historical accounts and personal experience.
Reflecting on Space: A Conversation with Sharon Louden
Sharon Louden is best known for room-size, site-specific installations constructed from thousands of small components. She uses a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation, aiming to capture movement and light. Within these works, industrial materials (her favorite is aluminum) are transformed into something more closely resembling forms in nature, even the human
Open To Association: A Conversation with James Shrosbree
James Shrosbree’s recent work is unexpected, un-designed, and “un-art-like.” His ceramic objects have low, lumbering, often ungainly shapes, at times buoyant and swelling, more frequently drooping as if pulled down by gravity. Some works appear clumsy and awkward, their monochrome glazes of unlovely yellows or greens slightly off; others are startlingly erotic in strangely bold
Caviar and Excrement: A Conversation with Wilfredo Prieto
A beautiful but wilting flower hangs in a noose, an egg sits next to an eight ball, and caviar enfolds excrement. Wilfredo Prieto’s works use simple, precise juxtapositions to tease out intriguing, open-ended metaphors. He often employs basic materials, projecting a certain poetry that at times recalls Minimalism and Arte Povera.
The Happy Effect: A Conversation with Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir
Hair is an extension of our identity, persona, and character. It can be added to, colored, and formed. It draws us in to look, to feel. Hair can also be a mechanism for attraction or disgust.
Sarah Meyers Brent: Natural Disasters
Sarah Meyers Brent’s friends tend to donate their used clothes to her, as if she were a branch of Goodwill. Not that she needs these garments to wear; instead, she uses them to construct complex sculptures in which their colors (faded to bright) and textures (smooth or fuzzy) add essential qualities to finished forms that
Provocation and Insistence: A Conversation with Mithu Sen
Mithu Sen is a provocateur, a risk–taker in deceptively gentle guise. At the heart of her work is a compulsion to peel away received, overt notions of the self and probe beneath them. She typically turns the tables on viewers.
Deep Wisdom and Collective Fortitude: A Conversation with Sonya Clark
Unraveling, 2015-ongoing. Detail of interactive performance. Photo: Taylor Dabney. Sonya Clark uses everyday materials to address “identity politics, collective fortitude, and social justice.” Returning repeatedly to the same basic materials, including copper pennies, hair, combs, and sugar, she brings value to quotidian objects through her investigations while asking viewers to consider the embedded histories surrounding
Françoise Grossen: Total Exposure
In Françoise Grossen’s work, intense physicality and presence are wedded to conceptual underpinnings–what an object is composed of is entirely consequential, meaning and purpose lying in material choices. Her objects, made between 1966 and 1999, are deeply and totally abstract yet also metaphorical.
