Sinead Kempley – Artist Statement
My sculptural work is designed to be held in the palm of your hand and interacted with – arranged, rolled, balanced, wrapped up, thrown, caught, broken. The production process is playful and led by a curiosity about materials. I consider the implications of working with natural resources or man-made materials such as jesmonite, plaster, pigment, plasticine, concrete, bog-oak, metal filings, solidified slime, polystyrene balls or stone offcuts. Ceramic glaze is mixed with lava ash or dust from industrial bricks. The forms vary – bulbous, stackable, cylindrical, tile or puzzle-like. Currently, I am translating these objects into digital 3D models. Certain changes occur when digitalising; they become hollow shells of their outer surface or floating objects in space. The digital objects can be played with, adapted or virtually wobbled, with a jarring connection to their physical forms.
In photographic and video work, I record objects and materials to make their scale ambiguous and sense of movement unclear. The photographs are often low-resolution images, the original place and context are lost; they become an archive of inconsequential fractures or openings. Solid ground is disintegrating, a damp corner is growing gradually, an everyday unease is projected onto a tiny hole opening in the ground. A series of these images have been translated into Risograph prints as part of a publication – the unorthodox colour separations extend the sense of disorientation – hinting at an alternative reality where something mundane becomes alien. I am collecting found footage of landslides, sinkholes, quicksand and cliffs falling away, and compiling the audio of these videos to hear the commentary of onlookers. The low-quality video footage is often breaking down itself, with glitches in the recordings or camera shake from the person filming as they say excitedly, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve caught a glimpse of hell on earth.”
My practice and research have been shaped by working as an arts educator with young children and partially informed by interests in absurdist fiction, sci-fi, anxiety and worrying, mineral extraction and industrial processes. I am part of the collective Surface Matters: a platform for peer to peer networking, critical debate and exchange for intergeneration female artists whose work utilities making and materiality.
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