'Balancing Acts'
Sioban Piercy 'Object Lesson (Five)', Artist's Book
Sioban Piercy and Leonie King have contributed to the Galway International Arts Festival for very many years as the organisers of the imPRESSions Biennial. Since initiating this exhibtion in the early 1980’s, imPRESSions has become a landmark event for printmakers and a regular feature of the festival. Together, Leonie and Sioban have championed printmaking as an exciting art medium for three decades. Both are consummate practitioners of printmaking in their own right and as this is a ‘gap’ year between Biennials, these two artists are making this an opportunity for a long overdue focus on their own art practice. They will be exhibiting in the historic setting of Oranmore Castle, Galway as part of the Galway Arts Festival 2022 in July. Appropriately titled 'Balancing Acts'- the distinguished context of this exhibition provides a juxtaposition and framework to their contemporary work.
Sioban Piercy 'Object Lesson (Six)', Artist's Book
Leonie King makes collagraph prints from highly textured plates and her work is an endless balancing of dynamics: of coloured texture over variant coloured texture. She has travelled extensively in South America, India and Morocco and foreign images and colours are brought home and blended with those of the Irish landscape: its patterns, surfaces, and mists. Her inspiration comes from an interacting of the emotional with reflections of the surrounding area, both present and past. The effervescent hues of the sea and land transpose themselves into multi-layered prints that are responses to a communing with soil, rock, and that which ekes out an existence on it.
Leonie King has lectured in printmaking and is a lifetime advocate and organiser of printmaking events and exhibitions. Her work is held in private and public collections nationally and internationally. She is a regular exhibitor in the Summer Show at the Royal Academy. London.
Leoinie King 'Intermittent Illuminations' , Mixed Media
Sioban Piercy uses the customary materials and practices of book binding and printing to create sculptures of delicate balance. In so doing, she conjures with all that books mean for us and deconstructs them as signifiers for our endeavours of self-interpretation: as sites where marks on a surface embody our efforts to construct meaning. She makes objects that draw attention to books as liminal spaces between the sensuous and the thought, where paper and ink transmute into objects of the imagination.
She studied at the Royal College of Art, London and has received numerous awards including the International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland; the Printmakers Council of Britain, London; British School at Rome scholarship. Her work is in the collections of the Arts Council of Ireland, the V&A, London, the Ashmolean, Oxford; the Instituto Nationale Per la Grafica, Rome; among others. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Printmakers (RE) and winner of the society’s residency at the Scuola di Grafica in Venice in 2019.