Sinéad O'Donnell

Sinéad O’Donnell has worked in performance, installation, site and time-based art for the past 10 years. Originally from Dublin and based in Belfast since 1995, she graduated from the University of Ulster in 1999 and received a fellowship from AHRB to take a Masters programme at Dartington College of Arts from 2003-04 where she graduated with distinction.

She studied sculpture in Ulster, textiles in Dublin and visual performance and time-based practices in England. Her work has been presented in Asia, Canada, Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East, North and South America and supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland, Socrates Erasmus, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the British Council and DCAL. She is currently in receipt of an Unlimited commission as part of the London 2012 Festival.

Sinéad’s performance practice is nomadic and travel has broadened her cultural perceptions and influenced her artistic sensibilities regarding time and space. She is also highly active on the Belfast performance art scene working with local galleries and organisations to foster performance art activity and support emerging artists in her community.

The critical and artistic core of Sinéad’s solo work explores identity, borders and barriers through immediate and mediated encounters with territory and the territorial. Notions of place in her performances are presented as actions or situations that demonstrate complexities, contradictions or commonality between material and memory, artist and audience, medium and discipline, timing and spontaneity, duality and alchemy, site and space, intuition and methodology.

She places emphasis on photography, video, text and collage to record her performances and interventions which often reveal an ongoing interest in the co-existence of other women and systems of kinship and identity.