source: artsynet

In Siobhan Hapaska’s sprawling mixed-media installations and discrete sculptural works, the artist presents a somber exploration of emotion that is undercut with a subtle sense of humor. Hapaska often combines natural materials, such as trees and skulls, with synthetic ones. Though her work elides representation and direct references, she incorporates concrete cultural symbols. In a 2011 installation, for example, she affixed nine charred tree stumps to metal supports so that they resembled the nine candles of a Hanukkah menorah. In all of her work, Hapaska is less interested in exploring cultural specificity than in the attendant emotional residue carried by the forms she adopts.
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source: kerlinie

b. 1963, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Siobhán Hapaska’s work is charged with a number of cultural and socio-political issues. Often difficult to categorize, her work is a poetic play of imagery and ideas that forge discordant connections. It’s a complex interweaving of narrative that is articulated through a diverse vocabulary of materials incorporating extraordinary objects that range from olive trees to magnets, tumble weeds to selenite. Her work addresses issues of communication, interiority, subjugation versus domination, loneliness and hurt, presenting each topic with an element of humour and an underlying hopefulness.

She has had solo exhibitions in recent years at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm; the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Camden Arts Centre, London (2007). She has also participated in various group exhibitions including British Sculpture: A View Through the 20th Century, The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2011); Islands Never Found, Palazo Ducale, Genoa, Italy; traveling to the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece; St. Etienne Museum of Modern Art, France (2010); Causing Chaos, St. Andrew’s Museum, St. Andrew’s, Scotland (2010); Life? Biomorphic Forms in Sculpture’, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, ‘Micro-narratives: tentation des petites realites’, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint Etienne and ‘Neo Futur – ver de nouveaux imaginaires’, les Abattoirs, Musee d’art moderne at contemporain, Toulouse, France (2008); ‘British Art Show’, Hayward Gallery, London and Printemps de Septembre, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France (2005),’Artifice’ at the Deste Foundation, Athens and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki and a highly acclaimed three-person exhibition with Charles Long and Ernesto Neto at Magasin 3, Stockholm.

Other exhibitions have included ‘Wonderful Life’, the Lisson Gallery, London, ‘Residue’, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, and ‘Plastic’, Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart and at the Stadtische Ausstellungshalle am Hawercamp, Munster in Germany. In 1997 she took part in Documenta X. She won the 1998 Irish Museum of Modern Art / Glen Dimplex Artists Award, represented Ireland at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and won the Paul Hamyln award in 2003.