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This show brings together older work which came at flux times in Shipsides’ practice. It marks developing tendencies, changes in thinking and expanding methods, for example, moving from direct ideas of rock-climbing as art to encompassing the wider collaborative worlds which circulate that experiential activity. It also marks shifts in artistic license, in becoming confident to follow the creative attention and process in more open and less controlled ways and often with humour. This led to personal insights as to how art, for artist and audience, operates with different logics which involve an unfolding through doing, and itself a kind of creative adventure without a prescribed outcome or predetermined take-away knowledge set.

All the works draw on specific contexts and subject matter in ways where elements act as motifs rather than fixed signifiers. In Zombie Line (2015) the bicycle wheel and wire become motifs which draw out ideas of mobility and boundaries across personal, political and historical trajectories, touching on the Avant-garde and the rise of militarised far right in the early 20^th century.

Questions around the fidelity of language occupies a key flux, where language fails as a coda for communicating experience or reliable meaning and becomes a malleable material itself. The original ZONA Di RIFUGIO (2009) sign was found in avalanche debris in the Italian Dolomites. Unsure of its intended meaning, the sign became open with potential, especially as Shipsides and Beggs escaped a near fatal lightning strike on the highest summit. The reformulated sign perhaps acts as a form of votive as well as an invitational welcome to refuge.

Another encounter, with Charles Oakley’s small, beautiful and beguiling gouache ‘A Coast Structure’ (c1970), featuring a curious geometric shape under a full moon, led to realising the depicted form in cast concrete structures Ouroboros (2012) which act like sentinels, and conveniently, as seats.

Cultural influences range from Avant-garde energies (especially that of ‘pata-physics where within ‘pata-perception’ Shipsides describes a perception infused by imagination) to prehistoric cave art, where the encounter is utterly compelling yet meaning is ultimately unknowable and mysterious.

A more recent flux, back to direct tree drawing in Belfast’s greenspaces, as a ‘kalos-eidos-scopeō’ practice of being and engagement through embodied, sustained looking and drawing, prefigures the question of what ‘knowledges or experiences are encountered through such drawings?

As this exhibition is in an institutional place of learning and knowledge acquisition, it feels important to state that for artists and audience, art knowledge and learning often operates in very different modes than more conventional subject areas. Here other knowledge also comes through doing or being with things and the transmission of it occurs in the encounter rather than primarily purely the reading of things.

Bio
Exhibiting internationally, Dan Shipsides is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast where he is also the course director of the MFA Fine Art. Some of the work here comes from within the Shipsides and Beggs partnership (since 2004), an ongoing collaboration crossing over individual practices.

View Dan Shipsides' website