This website provides some (haphazard) information on selected projects and artworks from 1996 to today.

For those not familiar with my work here is a quick introduction through these artworks and projects:

THREE POINTS DOWN TO ZERO
What We Didn't Know Was
6 Star
MORTAR | DEVICE
Rochers à Fontainebleau
Touchstone (Echo Valley / A Guiding Dilemma)
Gecko roof
The Stone Bridge
Sorry

SHIPSIDES AND BEGGS PROJECTS (co-authoring partnership)
WHERE THE LINES END
ANOTHER FINE MESS
THE LAMENT OF THE ACCOLADE TREE
DECIMATION in A Flat and F Minor
THE IRON WAY
The Alphabet Climb
BIVACCO
Still Not Out Of The Woods
YUPA STAR
RED FLOWERS ROUNDABOUT

Pata-perception: perceive-something, recognise-nothing, conceive-anything, cognise-everything.

My artwork is a form of creative geography, or at least a creative practice that concerns itself with some of the same matters as those disciplines of geography which might be described as learning through the ‘soles of our feet’. Time, place, matter, people, systems, ways of being and knowing. Geo-humanities. Together, how things are and how things might be. How strange, weird and beautiful things are and could still be, yet how twisted, limited and ugly things have become.

I am fascinated in our creative and critical relationships to place, spaces, encounters and events - in all and any of their potential manifestations - political, personal, topographical, psychological, phenomenological and/or nonsensical and pata-physical. Pata-physics is the best framework to understand creative energy that I have found. I have coined developed the term ‘pata-perception’* (wilful perception / grounded imagination) to frame the open processes of creativity, that as specifically emerging from an empirical ontology methodology. It’s an insightful way to think about artists’ method - what artists do when they are freely involved in the activity of being an artist.

Creativity is a key to change, fuelling the imagination to envision that things could be otherwise. We need things to be otherwise. Things cannot stay unchanged. We will not survive. My philosophy is broadly anarchist. I believe in the non-hierarchical and the diverse. I believe in questioning given values and established orthodoxies. The way it is, is never the way things were or must be. I believe people at their core are generous and mutually driven to contribute together. The nature of people is that of nature, collaborative and mutual.

The process of creativity, as way of accessing different insights, other ways of knowing and overshadowed knowledges, is what I’m committed to. For me art is a process, a way of seeing or doing differently and of generating possibilities. This is not a practice of making representations that aim to ‘show or tell’. Even though one might think so of my drawings (that would quickly dead-end), I have no desire to make pictures of the world. I describe my practice as more-than-representational in that it is an art of doing, making and being, rather than a form of ‘languaged’ communication or picturing - in fact, I often engage the breaking-apart of language, and image to render their other potentials.

My practice draws from my geographic horizons and reflects and embodies encounters (adventures and misadventures) in real life which often includes my passion for the outdoors and the natural environment. Often my work aligns with outdoor pursuits and often it involves sustained collaborative engagement with others, artists and non-artists.

The outcomes of my practices are multidisciplinary; drawing, video, image, installation, design, text/typography, sound, music.

Since 2004 many works and projects have been co-authored with Neal Beggs (Shipsides and Beggs Projects) another artist-climber based in northern France with whom I share a love of art, mountains, music and creative madness. There is often little separation between our individual practice – we have a mutual freedom to share, combine and mutate our interests.

*Neal prefers the term “leftfield”.

Biog.

Dan Shipsides, former co-director at Catalyst Arts, Belfast is an artist based in Orchid Studios and also teaches at the Belfast School of Art. He works individually and within collaborative dynamics, notably that of Shipsides and Beggs Projects.

Within the Shipsides and Beggs Project duo, he recently presented at the Katzen Art Centre at the American University Museum, in Another Fine Mess, 2020, with commissioned work including the moving-image work Where the Lines End, 2020. Shipsides also completed a moving image commission supported by aemi and Dublin Docklands, Three Points Down to Zero in 2017. He was awarded an AHRC Landscape and Environment Award in 2006, ACNI Major Artist Award in 2004, in 2000 won the Nissan Art Award IMMA (Bamboo Support) Dublin and 1998 won the Perspective award, OBG, Belfast (The Stone Bridge). 

He (often with Shipsides and Beggs Projects) has exhibited nationally and internationally including; American University Museum - Katzen Gallery (Another Fine Mess), La Cuisine, France (The Lament of the Accolade Tree), L'Orangerie Bastogne, Belgium (Still not out of the Woods), Microclima (Venice Biennale collateral - The Iron Way), ACCA, Melbourne (Desire Lines), The MAC, Belfast (Still not out of the woods), Aliceday Gallery, Brussels (Vigil | Star), South London Gallery (Games & Theory), Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (Radical Architecture), Wings Project Art Space, Switzerland (Performance), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (Elastic Frontiers), Konsthall C,  Stockholm, Sweden (Under plattan, ängen!), Platform Guranti, Istanbul (Hit & Run), Confederation Gallery, PEI, Canada (Beauty Queens), HEDAH, Maastricht (Rochers à Fontainebleau), Riga Sculpture Quadrennial, Latvia (European Space), Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (Beta), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (Pioneers), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (Sporting Life). Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (Endure), Melbourne International Biennial, Australia (Signs of Life).

Gratefully acknowledging the support of:
The Ulster University Ulster Aryt and Design Research Institute
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI)
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Opinions within this website are my own and do not reflect those of funders, employers or anybody else.

NEWS

Dan Shipsides recently /
currently / soon showing

SHEEBANG

Reason, Hope
& Fear

SUMMIT
STAMMERS


What We Didn't Know Was

Fendersky Gallery
2021

ANOTHER FINE
MESS

Shipsides&Beggs
Washington DC
2020

THE LAMENT OF
THE ACCOLADE
TREE

Shipsides&Beggs
La Cuisine, France
2018

DECIMATION in
A Flat & D Minor

Shipsides&Beggs
Audio artwork
2018

THREE POINTS DOWN TO ZERO

Dan Shipsides
PORT, RIVER
CITY, Dublin