Threadsuns - Sophie Béhal

Threadsuns, a new body of work from Sophie Béhal, comes as the result of the Tipperary Artist Residency Award with STAC, supported by Tipperary Arts Office. This body of work comes from a period of engagement with new materials in a new place. Situated in a rural landscape in County Tipperary, it searches for a new way of being in this world and uses repetition, ritual and process to investigate this. The sun and circles are used as a rhythmic refrain and repeated throughout.

The most reassuring of shapes, the circle, and its transcendental properties associated with infinity and certainty are questioned. The turmeric-dyed cotton sunprints hanging throughout the gallery will act as a balm in a dark winter, but like the shifting cycles of the sun, they will not last. Created by sunlight, they are a measure of light and time and space. In the gallery the weak winter light will cause them to fade and change over the duration of the exhibition, and as spring arrives they will leave.

This exhibition is the result of a sustained period of research, experimentation and learning for the artist in new sculptural materials : glass, slip cast ceramics, large-scale natural dyeing and printing, and welded steel. The different timescales of these materials and their sometimes contradictory properties of heaviness and lightness, movement and stillness, permanency and ephemerality are explored. This exhibition offers the viewer moments of hope and transformation whilst acknowledging the darkness of our time. It reflects on a human need for ritual, repetition and communication and strives to find these things in our everyday life.

Sophie Béhal is a visual artist, from Kilkenny and living in Co. Tipperary. Her work usually manifests itself as sculptural installation, often combining traditional sculptural materials of steel, clay and plaster with more ephemeral aspects of light and sound. Recent exhibitions: Awards Show, 2023, MART Dublin, With a View, Chocolate Factory, Dublin 2022, Dublin Art Book Fair, TBG+S, 2022 +2021; Projects: The Postal Project,Carlow Arts Festival 2021, Firestation Artists Sculpture Awardee 2022; Publications: Firestation FileNotes 2023. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Crawford, Cork, 2012 and an MA in Art, Research and Collaboration from IADT,Dublin, 2018 with a term spent in Taideyliopisto, Helsinki.

Threadsuns - Sophie Béhal 13th January – 24th February 2024
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