The term dirty — wow — sun* is an emerging multi-lingual neologism used as an alternative for 'The Anthropocene.’ Attributing an enhanced vibrancy to pollution, it describes hyper-saturated sunsets - as moments of our own making, and emblems of our own undoing. In her exhibition, dirty — wow — sun, Shiel presents a new body of work, that explores living's implicit relationship with the dark side, through a series of mutated botanical forms. In one of her ‘living autobiographies’ – Things I don’t want to know,’ Deborah Levy describes writing about being a writer as ‘a plume of dream stuck to a mountain’ – it’s hard enough, she explains, to know what it is to write, but to know what it is to be a subject also, seems a step too far, and is yet - irresistible. These self-reflexive paintings, in arrangements of wooden parts, appear to build into themselves - their own shadows, growing from them, as if intrinsically bound together in a shared agency with light.
*Coined by The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a participatory artwork facilitated by artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words yet exist. The original 'chuco헐sol' is composed of El Salvadorian slang, Korean and Spanish.
