Artists Statement
Through a practice-led research of critical theory, tackling the climate crisis in the epoch of the Anthropocene, I use documentary media that record images and sound to explore ontologies and poetics of the moment. Collecting natural sounds and artefacts to create a phenomenology of recent history. I draw on technology and the literature of Donna Haraway and Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin’s text Destructive Character presents us with a series of traits belonging to the essential destroyer of things, thus a restoring open space allows new paths to form that lead us through the rubble.
The destructive character sees nothing. But for this very reason, he/ she sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there too, he/she sees a way
- Walter Benjamin
My artistic research reflects spaces throughout the native woodlands of West Cork, Ireland, which are the sites of construction, destruction, decay, static, noise and silence. My aim is to privilege voices that have been lost through the official oppressive course of climate change. And where the destructive character of humans can be linked with the destructive character of nature itself.
I am driven by Donna Haraway’s questions in how to live well on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered. She suggests the emergence of a new period within the Anthropocene where refugees from environmental disaster, both human and non-human, will come together, it is a time when the human will try to live in balance and harmony with nature.
In my research, I seek a deeper epistemological and ontological shift from an Enlightenment worldview predicated on singular, essential values, to one predicated on plurality and contextuality.
CV.
SYLWIA MIGDAL
Leap IE
sylwiamigdal13.com
083 8230173
EDUCATION
1998 Art Hight School, Krakow Poland.
2011 Art and Craft, FETAC Level 5, Rossa College, Skibbereen Ireland. 2016-2020 BA in Visual Art TU Dublin, Sherkin Island Ireland.
2020 MA Art and Environment (Applied, Pending)
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
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2016 Members Exhibition, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen Ireland.
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2017 Help for Kelp, Bantry Ireland.
2017 Regions, Foyer Exhibition, Uillinn, Skibbereen Ireland.
2019 Members and Friends Exhibition, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen Ireland.
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2019 Epitaphium for a Tree, Connolly’s of Leap, Ireland.
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2020 Imagining an Island, Open Call Exhibition, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Art
Gallerry, Scotland
2020 Imagining an Island, In this Day and Age, Virtual Symposium, Art School at UHI,
North Uist, Scotland.
ARTISTS COLLABORATIONS
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2018 Walk and Talk, collaborated work with artist William Bock
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2019 Camera Obscura with William Bock
2019 Seminar and planting trees with artist Ian Wright, Manch Dunmanway Ireland
WORKSHOPS AND COURSES
2017-2019 Life Drawing with Ian Humphrey.
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2019 Printmaking with Charlotte Donovan.
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2020 A+E, Art and the Environment Course with Aoife Desmond, Guest House Project
Cork Ireland.
RESIDENCY
2019 IMMA mini-residency in response to their permanent collection with artists Barbara Knezevic, Jesse Jones and John Beattie, Dublin (2019).
RESOURCES
Donna Haraway; Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham and London. 2016
Nicholas Mirzoeff; How to See the World A Pelican Introduction; A Pelican Introduction. UK.2015 T.J. Demos; Against the Anthropocene, Visual Culture and Environment Today, Sternberg Press,
2016
Jedediah Purdy; After Nature, A Politics for the Anthropocene. Harvard University Press, 2015
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey; Allegories for the Anthropocene, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2019
Jan Jagodziński; Interrogating the Anthropocene, Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question, Palgrave Macmillan, Canada. 2018
Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene, Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, London 2015
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Penguin Books, New York. 1962
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They Communicate. Greystone
Books. Vancouver / Berkeley. 2015
Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, Open Humanities Press, London 2018
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Bloomsbury, London 2013
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Polity Press 2019