Siân TORRINGTON

What we bring back

What is deep space? Siân Torrington suggests it is the place we go to as artists and bring things back. Internal, unknown private space. What we bring back presents sculptures and drawings as relics or traces of what we bring back from the embodied experience of making. Fragments of sculpture expand out and through their boxes; relics that are still in the process of becoming. In living, creative space, we need protection; amulets, wands, and tool belts,  because we don’t know what we will find.  

The passageway to deep space is the body: a shifting gateway of processes and actions. In these drawings and sculptures, the moving body is traced through colourful pastels, charcoal and lines that struggle against each other; supporting while they are also escaping. Sculptures are made from materials that are soft, decorative, painted and spiky: stuck, cut, bound, and added to. We are all a collection, like flotsam, bound together by living in a swelling, tumbling ocean of activity.  

 Siân Torrington explores relationships of interconnectivity and interdependence, through an expressive language of colour, mark making and structural props that hold drawings and sculptures together - just like we are held together.

Siân Torrington lives and works in Wellington New Zealand. She has had numerous solo and groups shows and has been commissioned for public art institutions, including Soft is Stronger than Hard at City Gallery Wellington, and The way you have held things for Christchurch Art Gallery, as well as for festivals and by the Public Art Fund Wellington. She has held artist residencies in Samoa at Tiapipata Arts Centre, and Shanthi Rd, India through the Asia New Zealand Foundation. Siân graduated with an MFA with distinction from Massey University in 2010.

Image: Siân Torrington What We Bring Back AIRspace Projects Inc 2018