SUPERNATURAL BUREAU
Supernatural Bureau
Autumn Exhibition
1 August - 1 December 2023
Kunstverein Aughrim
Launched as part of our Autumn Preview on 1 August 2023, this installation features a site-specific landscape painting, inside a hanging tray, slicing through the width of Kunstverein Aughrim. It is both a screen, protecting an inner world, and a façade, projecting information. It is a topological enquiry and a pictorial representation of a multi-dimensional terrain. It sits aside a major new body of work by the artist that is on view at VISUAL Carlow until January 2024. What we see at Kunstverein Aughrim is a reflection of Shiel’s working processes and a portal into the sublime and slippery world that her work conjures.
Sitting within the bureau, a series of objects act like orientation cues in Shiel’s gameplan. These objects, retrieved, prepared and arranged performatively, are posed to activate the surface. They are the tangible physical result of a series of transformational image-making exercises, performed by actors at selected points on a map. They have been created using observational, alchemical and co-operative actions; burial and excavation, corraling, controlling, planting, picking, drawing, burning and sawing. Disruptive agents like the weather, crumbling walkways, tricks of the eye and ear, sleights of hand, and a gestural chants - all influenced their creation. Throughout her practice Shiel is interested in questions of agency and autonomy. She borrows from the fields of gaming, theatre-making, fiction and non-fiction writing, all narrative forms that show us how humans are both magical and powerless. Throughout this body of work, interactions between the artist and the landscape function as a method to solve artistic problems, in which the artist questions her own agency within the world, and how especially human it is to bet everything on hopeful acts.
