Siobhan Quigley

 My work explores the essential physical intensity of the game of Gaelic Football – from the inside, as a player - immersed at a personal level both physically and mentally. On the pitch you must engage. Players surrender to the unbridled passion that builds and is maintained over the course of a game that over-rides any reservation about the potential impact of bodies. I want to express the rawness of the encounter where awareness switches solely to the pitch and whatever it physically takes to triumph.

 

 Through the material of clay and using my body as a physical implement, the rawness of the making experience echoes play – the abandon, the suspension of reservation, the sensations of sliding, buffeting, colliding, those marks made- left behind on each other and the pitch, documenting the brutality, the force, the energy. Form, material and surface embody physical experience, with added colour suggesting the tribal nature of the encounter.