Simone Kearney

Simone Kearney
11 to 24 August 2022

Simone’s key interest lies in borders – specifically, those that establish or negate individuated identities.

I highlight the seams of relationships, the friction of margins where things become more, or less,
themselves. I make visual embodiments of the transplant, the fragment, the fluid sign, the
threshold. Using sculpture, painting, textile, installation, and video, I see how particular mediums
uniquely render instances of encounter and convergence, alignment and misalignment.

In more recent projects, Simone has been deploying the fragment, the module (signal of some kind of lost or [im]possible whole), as a vocabulary, akin to a set of letters that one has received in a game of scrabble and reflecting on ‘How can they be arranged to make meaning? Is there a hierarchy between the parts? The fragment/module is repeated, each time slightly differently. This is another way to foreground the frame, lens, aperture, emphasizing how one is subject to the particularity of a (particular!) position, to a point of view in time. Knowledge is situated, confined to the (limited) extensions of a body subject to the temporal and the spatial. Could a collection of fragments conjure an epiphany?

Arranging, weaving, piecing together these repeated units allows the artist to emphasize the act of configuration itself. A language, or position, a meaning, a sentence, a story, to be built. Emphasis is given to the material aspects or fragile components and existence of an image. Simone is also drawn to laboured acts of construction, pointing to the ways in which acts of configuration are never neutral, but embodied, always tangled into, and shaped by, apparatuses of power and patriarchy.

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, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Ireland. 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, and Ragdale, among others. She is author of two books of poetry: “Days” (Belladonna Press, 2020, forthcoming) and “My Ida” (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She teaches at Parsons New School for Design.

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