How is your Heart?

‘How is your Heart’ – a participatory installation as part of The Performance Arcade 2024 It’s hard to say how we are these days; perhaps we are overwhelmed. ‘How is your heart’ offers audiences expressive wearable sculptures and drawings to stand in for words, expressing complexity, beauty, hope and fear.  Expressing the internal externally without…

Staying open is a practice

Staying open is a practice is a show of pieces and fragments lovingly bound, stitched and layered together, to make new wholes. The world is constantly changing, and what we thought was solid, has become unstable in the last few years. What has been stable for Siân, is practice. Working through expressive movement – opening up the body to keep discovering what feelings and spaces are possible. Not getting stuck on what we thought we knew.

I just have to let you, be

Exhibition at OREX Gallery, Auckland, 2022 You can see the gallery site here This work has taken a lot of energy to make, at a time when it feels like there isn’t much energy to tap into in the world. I now have a studio at home, and te taiao – nature, has been where…

I’m glad you’re here, just the way you are

Exhibition – 27th June – 18th July Toi Poneke Gallery, Wellington Sometimes art making feels like an act of self-acceptance. What are these tangled, drippy, complex, funny things? They are you, and me, and what’s between us. They push and pull, unravel and stick together. They are proud and stand up. They are tired, and…

Small drawings

‘Is it this?’ Essay by Alice Tappendem

In 2021, Alice and I started talking about the work I was making. She visited my studio while the works were still in process, still deciding who they were. She wrote this piece to accompany my exhibition at Orex, Auckland. Is it this? Alice Tappenden Gold curtains frame the studio doorway. Pulling them aside, I…

Big drawings

I’m thinking about all the ways I have gone BIG over my art making career. From simple but wildly energetic line caves in deep, rich, black charcoal, to complex delicate webs hanging in space.

Putting the feeling on the outside

Small spaces for expression and jewellery to say how you feel and keep people distant and close at the same time. I wrote this, and made these pieces, in the beginning times of Covid, last year. But as it rolls on, it still feels relevant to share, and to make wearable pieces for the outside, when the inside feels all of the things.

‘Queer assembly’ – writing by Hugo Robinson on ‘I’m glad you’re here, just the way you are’

““The world is full of strange and queer textures. Bits and strings and piles of matter that we feel with our hands and our eyes and our ears. The closer we get to them, and the more willing we are to feel those expressions, the more likely we are to have a lasting connection.” – Hugo Robinson”

Spaces to talk

I keep thinking about making bigger things again lately. This time I’d like to build spaces that we can have conversations inside of. The spaces and made with what we have, stuck together, home made, using skills gathered together and taught by our friends, strangers, parents. There are bits that don’t fit together that well,…

I’m gonna share more

I write all the time. I’ve always written alongside my art practice. I have a folder of writing that I shuffle around, and work on, and edit… and leave in the folder. Well, enough! I am gonna share more. I’ll put things here, and on my other blog – siantorringtonartclasses.com. My main motivation is that…

Band Sensations responds live, to “I’m glad you’re here, just the way you are”(in place of an artist talk)

Toi Poneke gallery You’re here. I want to welcome you. I want to invite you in. It’s been a really difficult time, for a while now. For everyone. The whole world is battling a pandemic. Political shifts are huge, seismic. Racism and white supremacy is in the spotlight, in sight, undeniable and needing to be…