Sonia Shiel turns painting on its head, writes Catherine Marshall, and her exhibition invites reflective pauses, moments to question what you have just seen
‘Every story has a path turn,’ a robotic voice declared repeatedly in a short film in Sonia Shiel’s installation The Incomplete Platypus at Rua Red gallery in Tallaght in 2016, before the word ‘Pat’, slowly becoming ‘Pattern’, appeared on the screen. The play on ‘path’ and ‘turn’ defined a direction along what might be a once-off journey, but is instantly modified into a pattern, suggesting possible repetition and a measure of familiarity. There is always a twist in Shiel’s narratives, represented either visually or aurally or played out in performance. The viewer’s role is to decide which meaning or direction is available to them at the precise point when the narrator exits the scene.
Shiel draws on her background in ballet and visual art, both impacted by theatre studies, especially fictional narrative allied to dramatic movement and set design, an impressive knowledge of digital gaming and a residency at the Art & Law Program at Fordham Law School, New York. Artists are pressurised nowadays to focus on a single discipline, but Shiel’s determination to draw on all of them to remind us of our vital interconnections with the earth has inspired her from the beginning. It underwrote such spectacular paintings as Storm for Climbing, where the black rain splatters of the storm have competing upward and downward trajectories (Fig 3). The storm is black, but the painting is dazzlingly light filled.
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