Porous
NICE 2025: POROUS — Organised by TBA21–Academy and Villa Arson
Sea Bones A series of paintings made from limestone, sediment, and crushed shells locally sourced from the coastline region—evoking the once-flourishing port’s wetland that covered the region for over 300 years. The materials and forms in oil paint evoke environmental processes that shape landscapes in transition, with edges and seascapes in motion.
NICE 2025: POROUS — Ports as Interspecies Dwelling, Biennale des Arts et de l’Océan 2025 at Villa Arson, Nice, France
June 7–9, 2025
Curated by María Montero Sierra, and organised by TBA21–Academy and Villa Arson, with support from the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS4Water II initiative.
Siobhan McDonald | at World Ocean Day, the UN Conference on the Oceans & the Biennale des Arts et de l’Océan 2025. Organized by TBA21–Academy with the support of the European Commission Initiative S+T+ARTS4Water II. The exhibition brings together new works in film, painting, sculpture and installation, tracing different temporal and material states of water.
The heart of the presentation unfolds around a shipwreck, filmed while submerged beneath the sea. The film traces Dublin Port’s layered identities through cultural, historical, and anthropological lenses. Depicting streams, rivers and oceans as planetary networks, it navigates submerged landscapes, and the shifting boundaries of coastal erosion—ultimately posing questions about our relationship to water, memory, and the future. The image of the sea appears as a metaphor, ever moving and changing its form, relentless and elusive but also timeless and constant.
This haunting journey from wetland to shoreline — navigates a two hundred year slice of underwater time through a fluid and multifaceted lens, spanning scientific, cultural, and historical perspectives. The film Floating Body captures a vivid revelation of a shipwreck to reveal precarious balance at a pivotal moment in rising sea levels. It lies just outside the formal boundaries of Dublin Port, on Pormarnock—a 19th-century fishing vessel buried beneath the sand for over 200 years.
Read more here:👉 Interalia Magazine
Floating Body
The film that traces Dublin Port’s layered identities through cultural, historical, and anthropological lenses. Depicting streams, rivers and oceans as planetary networks, it navigates submerged landscapes, shipwrecks, and the shifting boundaries of coastal erosion—ultimately posing questions about our relationship to water, memory, and the future. The image of the sea appears as a metaphor, ever moving and changing its form, relentless and elusive but also timeless and constant.
Siobhan McDonald commissioned by GLUON within the framework of Studiotopia: Arts Meets Science in The Anthropocene (2019 — 2022), an initiative funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Commission .
Supported by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Brussels Capital-Region.
STUDIOTOPIA Fellowship 2022 Ongoing
Siobhan McDonald commissioned by GLUON within the framework of Studiotopia: Arts Meets Science in The Anthropocene (2019 — 2022), an initiative funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Commission .
Supported by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Brussels Capital-Region.
