2025
Exhibition Residencies
02/10/2017 - 31/10/2017
My practice throughout the last 20 years has incorporated work in painting, printing, photography and film. In particular, I have worked in drawing as a mark-making reflection on transience and fragility. In my paintings I am interesting in moments of awkwardness or uncertainty – whereby the image is not quite resolved into a coherent whole. I am increasingly drawn to insouciance; messiness and the sense of unresolvedness in paintings. I have in recent years become more and more suspicious of the supposed rights and wrongs of painting: strong composition, balanced deployment of light and shade, tempered use of colour, visual resolution, meaning as brushstroke, brushstroke as direction, direction as meaning. Referencing both literary and imagined landscapes, my ongoing interest in history and narrative is echoed in fragments and traces, whilst undoing or trying to get away from a literal visualisation. Gestural interventions and consciously placed visual obstacles allow for emotional and poetic explorations of thought, gesture and materiality.
Phillip Shiels
Phillip Shiels (b.1965 Dublin) studied painting at IADT and the Jutland Academy of Art and holds a BA and MA in The History of Ideas & Aesthetics from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has lived and practised in Denmark since 1983 and relocated to Ireland in 2011. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Kunsthal Charlottenburg Copenhagen, Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Kunsthal Aarhus and most recently in The Retrieval of The Beautiful (2016) at The Painting Centre, New York. In Ireland he was a studio member at Pallas Projects, Dublin for two years before moving to Sligo where he now lives. He has participated in Rua Red Open 2012 (Jur: Alice Maher), Mermaid Bray Open 2013 (Jur:Patrick T Murphy) and Leitrim Sculpture Centre Open 2015 & 2016. His works are represented in public and private collections in Denmark, including the Danish Office of Public Works, The Aarhus City Council Civic Collection, The Svendborg Museum of Art, Danske Bank and Nykredit Denmark.
Past Residencies