Profile °4 – SIOBÁN PIERCY

essay by Aidan Dunne; interview by Vera Ryan

ISBN 978 0946641 901     48 pages (paperback)    22.5x22.5cm    38 illus

Siobán Piercy is a hugely imaginative and thoroughly original printmaker. Her desire as an artist is primarily to reveal ‘someting of the human experience’. In this book we are told how time spent studying in London and Italy were to have an irrevocable impact on her work, and how reoccuring motifs and preoccupations have matured and shifted as a consequence. Her beautifully sensuous prints, with suggestions of physiologial research, draw on the works of Danté and William Blake. Her interests in dualism and psychoanalysis are also evident, and are used in her work to reveal the struggles inherent in acheiving the expression of our spiritual nature. 

EXTRACTS

"Any approach to Sioban Piercy’s work must take account of the titles of her screenprints. What of them? Well, their grammatical formality, their sometimes inordinate length, their catechismal tone, their newspaper-headline phrasing, their air of foreboding, and their underlying rueful, anti-Panglossian conviction that all is not for the best in what is far from the best of all possible worlds (‘Can bad weather ever be avoided?’). Furthermore, for all their singular precision, they often sidestep what is, on the face of it, their primary function: to provide us, like the chapter headings of eighteenth-century novels, with a capsule description of what is going on. Why specify with such pernickety attention to detail when the specifications open up new realms of possibility rather than pinning down the images? But then, something similar happens with the images themselves. Both titles and compositions make it clear that we are dealing with narratives, or at least with clues to narratives, but we cannot take anything beyond that for granted. In at least one case, we are referred to a pre-existing narrative. It is tempting to regard the Sisyphus prints as something of a Rosetta stone given the surprisingly direct correspondence that exists between title, image and narrative source. There are several treatments of the subject, all referring to one posthumous episode in Sisyphus’s mythology. Consigned to Hades, the legendarily canny king must repeatedly push uphill a boulder that immediately rolls down again – an icon of epic and futile labour that may say a great deal about Piercy’s attitude to the often embattled protagonists who inhabit her fictional space."

— from the essay by Aidan Dunne

 "At the Crawford I majored in painting, and I took printmaking – screenprinting in particular – as a second subject. I also worked part-time as a commercial screenprinter while a student, printing T-shirts and that sort of thing, to put myself through college. I gained a great deal of technical experience from this, and became quite proficient in the medium. When I was looking for an alternative to painting, I quite naturally thought of screenprinting, but I have deliberately avoided the hard edge, flat colour that usually typifies screenprinting, and sought out ways of using the medium that are, perhaps, closer to painting and drawing. In the last year, I have changed from using oil-based to water-based inks. This has forced me to change the way I have been working, and it has taken me a long time to come to grips with these new inks, but the oil-based inks and, in particular, the thinners used with them are so unhealthy that I didn’t want to continue using them...
          My work is a continual search for more effective ways to represent my fundamental concerns, a search for images that are both personal and archetypal, for pictorial narratives that communicate something of human experience. These preoccupations have always been important to my work, and while they are continually refined and modified, they are still intrinsically the same as when I began my career. I can’t imagine that I will stop this search."

— Siobán Piercy in conversation with Vera Ryan 

Siobán Piercy treads a distinctive path with her accomplished screenprints, a medium that is something of a rarity in the fine-art quarter and one which Piercy uses to great effect.  — Ian Wieczorek, Circa