Sonia Shiel: How The Oyster Makes The Pearl

Kevin Kavanagh is proud to present How The Oyster Makes The Pearl, a solo show by Sonia Shiel. Sonia Shiel’s interdisciplinary practice combines key methodologies from art, law and theatre to imbue characteristics, autonomy and personal narratives in the inanimate objects and painted works that she creates. Playfully usurping the normal conditions of an artwork with a kind of self-conscious agency usually reserved for living things, her works are often free-standing or traversable; presented with their own volition, backstory, or environment; and sometimes consolidated within installations, audio works, performance or video. Shiel’s collection of paintings for How The Oyster Makes The Pearl presents the world translucently in a careful matrix of tone, opacity and colour. While framed, stuffed or folded like things we intend to keep safe and admire forever, Shiel’s flat vanishing spaces are already evanescing. They reveal the shape-shifting dimensions of a sentient landscape, in which reflections abandon their hosts, horizons untether themselves from their axis, gestural marks pose willfully and light plays tricks before disappearing.