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