Daire O'Shea
Bio
Daire O’Shea is a sculptor, writer and educator based in Cork. He received his BA in Sculpture and Combined Media from Limerick School of Art and Design and his MA in Modern and Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory from UCC. He is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD with Ulster University. He is deeply engaged with notions of physical materialism and the possibilities offered by sculptural objects for new ways of engaging with and perceiving the world around us. His current research is focussed on developing new languages for engaging with maritime themes through the lens of the hyperobject.
Daire has exhibited widely throughout the country in spaces such as The Complex, Dublin, Platform Arts, Belfast, Limerick City Gallery, The Luan, Athlone and Uilleann, Skibereen. He has recently been commissioned for a public sculpture by Westmeath County Council. He also writes art criticism and theory and has recently published essays for The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny and The Complex in Dublin. He lectures in Crawford College of Art and Design.
Artist Statement
Daire O’Shea is engaged in sculptural responses to the infrastructure that underpins daily life in the anthropocene. Through developing materialist sculptures he questions and explores systems such as contemporary road networks, agricultural grass production, railway to greenway transitions and most recently maritime systems of mapping and attempting to rationalise the churning oceans. The philosophical school of object oriented ontology, and speculative realism more broadly heavily informs his practice and research.
Through developing sculptures that exist in the same spaces that we do and materially embody the hidden infrastructures that surround us the practice challenges us to engage meaningfully with the inert matter of objects – push hard enough and the objects may just start pushing back.
