Simone Kearney
11 to 24 August 2022.

Simone Kearney’s multidisciplinary practice uses sculpture, painting, textile, and text, making embodiments of the transplant, the fragment, the fluid sign, and the threshold.

In one ongoing project, Kearney has been piecing together various materials in quilt-like formation, emphasizing the act of configuration itself. Akin to a set of letters one might have received in a game of scrabble, fragments of material are arranged, gesturing towards an abstract sentence, or visual story. Bits and pieces of stained and stitched materials (including repurposed wool blankets, drop cloths and hand-woven elements), are barely held together, alluding to a kind of loose patchwork. As the ground of the image becomes synonymous with blanket, shield, skin, inside and outside appear to share a single surface. Kearney’s constructions point to the ways in which acts of composition are not neutral, but embodied; tangled into, and shaped by, apparatuses of power. Vague forms bubble up as if from some deep; sense moves through the surfaces like light rays through seawater. What is under the surface, like a repressed or dream language, seems to breach the weave.

Simone Kearney, b. in Dublin in 1984, is an artist and writer based in New York City. She has exhibited her work in New York, London, Toronto, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Ireland. She is author of the poetry collection Days (Belladonna Press, 2021) and the chapbook My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She was a 2019 Paint School Shandaken Projects fellow, a 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Nominee, and a 2014 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She has been awarded residencies at The Lighthouse Works, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, among others. She teaches at Parsons New School for Design in Manhattan.

WCAC acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council and Cork County Council in making these residencies possible.