Sian Costello: Performing Apparitions. Theo Hynan-Ratcliff e

SIAN COSTELLO IS a painter based in Limerick city, currently working from Wickham Street Studios. Sian graduated from Limerick School of Art & Design in 2020. There she began her innovative practice, incorporating performance, analogue photography, drawing, painting, and video elements. Since graduation she has forged a position within the landscape of contemporary painting, with projects ranging from portraiture to book illustration, as well as collaborations with textile artists, fashion designers and radio stations. Recent work centres on the female lived experience and seeks to interrupt the historically passive position of the life model.

Sian’s latest series of paintings, ‘Rapture of the Sisters’, was first exhibited in Detroit Stockholm Gallery, Sweden, last June in collaboration with curator Alice Máselníková and in association with the artist-run collective, Flat Octopus. The exhibition ran again from December 2021 to January 2022 in Sample Studios, Cork, as part of Connect 5.

This body of work is influenced by her performance piece, Dress Rehearsals for the Apparitions of Saint Veronica (2020), during which she designed and constructed a large camera obscura – a stage of privacy and revelation – which she used to record a life drawing class. She filmed the ritualistic process of the model preparing for the class, and the intimacy of undressing and redressing.

This performance was in part an ode to the eponymous Saint Veronica, who used her veil to wipe the face of Jesus on the road to Calvary. The action of the bodily imprint, the sweat of his skin pressing into the veil, purportedly imbued it with healing powers. The imperfect pressing of body, the symbolic effect of touch, and its indelible residue turned to relic, are ongoing fascinations for Sian. As we engage with the fluid forms and the softly held yet contorted figures which populate many of her works, the transfer of human mark and its mythical powers seem to interrogate the actions and traditions of painting itself. Sian is interested in painting as a mode of capture. For her, the indelible mark of the hand – suspended through the gestures of the body – is both an act of translation and a potent function of painting.

‘Rapture of the Sisters’ also responds to a painting by Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618). In a process of re-enactment and corporeal research, Sian takes on life modelling, moulding her own body to echo the contortions of the original model. A painting of two halves, she takes on personas of both painter and model, intertwining them to interrogate the lexicon of classical painting, subverting its histories and traditions through her embodied process.

Reflecting back on the footage – abstracted through the primitive focus of the handmade camera – the softness of memory fills in the tacit knowledge of her body. A collision of documentation and muscle memory becomes the primary material to begin painting. Fundamentally, the artist uses corporeality as a method through which to explore the inherent violence of this subject matter. Her lived experience, physicality and interruptive gestures aim to liberate the passive female form, depicted in the Old Master’s hand.

Sian’s works will also be presented in ‘girls, girls, girls’, a major new exhibition, curated by fashion designer Simone Rocha, which opens at Lismore Castle Arts on 2 April. This exhibition will explore the position of the female gaze and centres on female practitioners who interrogate experiences of femininity and the multi-layered and subversive characteristics contained within feminine identity. The presence of the artists’ body lingers across this exhibition, designed by Rocha to bring these diverse artists into conversation with one another. As Sian continues to examine the relationship between painter and model – and associated elements of voyeurism, vanity, and intimacy – it will be interesting to see how the personal agency and power of the female figure, in particular her embodied lived experience and how this permeates her new works Wishful Self Portrait 1-3 which will be on display in Lismore Castle Arts in April.

Circling back to Saint Veronica and her imbued relic, the material of the paintings themselves will linger in the gallery space as an indexical mark of the artist’s body, matter imprinted with human contact suspended in time as a relic of presence, gesture, and embodied feminine identity occupying the contested space of the self-portrait.

Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe is an artist who is currently studying Art Writing in Glasgow School of Art. @ theo_hynanratcliffe_ Notes:

1 Connect 5 is a partnership initiative between GOMA (Waterford), Wickham Street Studios (Limerick), Engage Art Studios (Galway), BKB Studios (Dublin), and Sample-Studios (Cork).

Sian Costello, Andrew’s Aunt, 2020, oil on canvas; image courtesy of the artist.