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@sineadkempley

Sinéad Kempley (born 1990, Southeast London) is a visual artist, educator and PhD student, currently working in Northumberland and Edinburgh. Through provisional assemblages of human and more-than-human remnants, her practice engages with the depletion and transformation of matter. These assemblages inhabit multiple temporalities, through a residue, a material life-span, a fossilisation. She uses photogrammetry and repetitive casting to fix transitory material in stasis: fused kelp roots are soap-cast; a discarded piece of synthetic rubber doormat produces slip-cast ceramic copies; hot glass fills a sand mould of a digitally enlarged tubeworm fossil. Through duplicating and multiplying, casts become made-strange substitutes, reconfigured for divergent uses across subsequent installations.


Her PhD research examines how a particular form of contemporary art practice, fictioning (Burrows and O’Sullivan, 2019), can be used in the study of waste and wasting. It then considers how employing a fictioning-based practice in a participatory context can be used to expand public discussions on waste and pollution with artists, educators, and children across diverse UK contexts. The waste she focuses on consists of by-products of industry and fossil-fuel-derived materials with particular attention given to how these materials disintegrate, leak, merge, soak, and seep.

Selected Group Exhibitions & Installations

An Elastic Continuum, S1 Artspace, June 2023

No Longer Viable, Hidden Door, June 2023

Risk Averse, Art and Design PhD Symposium, Edinburgh College of Art, December 2022

Temporary Sediment Storage, Edinburgh College of Art Contemporary Art Practice MA Graduate Show, August 2022

Salt Lick, Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, July 2022

Tough Crowd, Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, May 2022

An Unravelling, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, March 2022

First Marks, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, November 2021

Artist Talks and Conferences 
Radical Repetition stream, London Conference in Critical Thought, UK, June 2023
An Elastic Continuum Symposium, s1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK, June 2023
Sounds of Making interview and audio exchange project, Surface Matters, online, September 2021

Education

2022-2025 PhD, Edinburgh College of Art

2020-2022 Masters in Contemporary Art Practice (Distinction), Edinburgh College of Art 

2011-2014 BA Photography (First Class Honours), London College of Communication

2010-2011 Foundation in Art and Design, Camberwell College of Art

Awards and Scholarships 

College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences College Research Award awarded by Edinburgh College of Art, 2022-2025

Andrew Grant Postgraduate Scholarship, 2020

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