Sinead O'Donnell
Sinéad O’Donnell is an Irish artist. She currently lives and works in Belfast and travels extensively with her work.
Artistic Practice & Background
Sinéad's practice is performance based and site/context responsive, having worked across the mediums of performance, installation & time based art and studied sculpture at the University of Ulster, textiles in Dublin and visual performance and time-based practices at Dartington College of Arts.'Her work explores identity, borders and barriers through encounters with territory and the territorial. She sets up actions or situations that demonstrate complexities, contradictions or commonality between medium and discipline, timing and spontaneity, intuition and methodology, artist and audience. She uses photography, video, text and collage to record her performances which often reveals an ongoing interest in the co-existence of other women and systems of kinship and identity. Sinéad’s practice is nomadic and travel has broadened her cultural perceptions and influenced her artistic sensibilities regarding time and space. '
Sinéad is a member of Bbeyond and active within the Belfast performance art scene where she works with a range of organisations to develop and disseminate performance art and support emerging artists working in the medium.
Sinéad was a 2010/11 ArtsAdmin bursary recipient during which time she focused on areas of her practice addressing disability, community and collaboration, including the development of CAUTION project.
Projects
CAUTION Project
CAUTION was an Unlimited commission as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The project was financially supported by the National Lottery and delivered in partnership between London 2012, Arts Council England, the Scottish Arts Council, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council. CAUTION brought together the artists Sylvette Babin, Mariel Carranza, Paul Couillard, Poshya Kakil, Shiro Masuyama and Sinéad O’Donnell to re-frame their artistic identities within a discourse of invisible disability.During 2011, Sinéad visited each artist and worked with them to produce material that explored invisibility, materiality and states in-between. The process was cumulative and each artist built upon ideas generated by previous encounters and journeys with Sinéad, connecting the artists and acting as a catalyst for the progression of the work.
Through this series of meetings, actions and correspondences across continents, CAUTION navigated between the national and international, the personal and political, the structured and the shattered, to give the artists space to explore their limits, break through boundaries and work with the extremes of their abilities to communicate and make things happen.