Niamh Coffey: Siúnta

Taking its name from the Irish for a seam or joint, Siúnta weaves together disparate narratives into imagined ecological relationships. Forms of flesh, fur, flower and feather mingle and merge. Subjects develop symbiotic relationships, exhibit unfamiliar actions and establish neoteric habits together.

In 1937-39, the Irish Folklore Commission asked primary school children to collect local history from their relatives and neighbours. Nestled in exercise copies, between thousands of stories detailed in meticulous handwriting, lie tales of metamorphosis and binary-blurring. Hares become milk-hungry witches, needy children are turned to stone, gooseberries transform sore eyes, tadpoles swirl in boggy bellies. Siúnta uses these instances of metamorphosis as departure points to wriggle further into absurd and imaginary realms. These archives show that in an earlier Irish imaginary world, the boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred.

The exhibition was made by gathering these stories of binary-blurring between humans and non-humans and making drawings based on them. These drawings then played together, created links and found connections, they were collaged together, their elements were extended and emphasised, their actions sped up and slowed down, their beginnings swapped with their ends, subjects up and left one story for another. Narratives eventually emerged from this process and were brought into a textile world, a medium used because of its rich history with collaborative story-telling, connotations to gender and queerness and ability to physically join separate elements together.

 These collaged narratives offer a humourous invitation to envisage new ways of interacting with and existing within the larger matrix of nature and the earth. This work is guided by the concept of queer ecology, which asks us to abandon ideas of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and instead asks us to see humans as part of a complex and interwoven system, whose patterns and processes are different from our own.

https://niamhcoffey.ie/