Niamh Coffey
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About
Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois. She graduated from NCAD in 2016 with a honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices and a highly commended thesis titled 'Through the telescope, under the microscope: Sarah Sze'. Recent exhibitions her work has featured in include: Halftone at the Library Project; Locale#3 at A4 Sounds and; Awkward Interjection at Pallas Project/Studios. A former studio member of Ormond Studios and Blackchurch Print Studios, she has recently joined A4 Sounds studio.
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Working through drawing, print and sculpture, Niamh Coffey's practice creates new narratives, myths and hyperboles surrounding queer subjects. Her work depicts scenes of apparent mayhem and absurdity performed by hairy, leaky, oozing, queer subjects. Delicately balanced, often cyclic systems work under a precise rationale where each strange and frantic act all have their exact and vital place. She uses shape-shifting myths as a starting point to question our relationship to the unfamiliar and explore the potential of hybrid forms. In her work, these forms execute peculiar, repetitive actions, establish unusual habits and develop intimate and symbiotic relationships.She uses themes of metamorphosis, mutation and transformation to interrogate portrayals of otherness and unempathetic systems of understanding. Through collage and juxtaposition, her work produces imagery that questions how the identity and agency of bodies might be regulated by society, gender and choice. She examines the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies, identities and worlds. Her work endeavours to evoke a radical empathy towards the Other, whose experiences are always, to some degree, unknowable and unquantifiable to those gazing in.