Lenten Program 2/21 - Featuring Siobhán Byrns

Wednesday, February 21st at 6pm is our first week of Blessed ART Thou: a Lenten program on Spirituality and the Arts. Dinner will be served promptly at 6:00 and our program will begin about 6:25. We will be joined by local artist and educator Siobhán Byrns. She will be discussing her artwork and its connection to contemporary environmental and societal issues.  Through a variety of mediums and artistic, chemical and elemental techniques rooted in conservation and photography, Byrns’ work invites the viewer to step into the complex notions of identity, permanence and decay and legacy we leave behind.  Read more about her work below!

Signaling Theory - Siobhán Byrns

Thematically, my art is an attempt to raise awareness of the fragility of nature and the human experience that longs to be witnessed.

Addressing environmental and societal issues, this work is a deep investigation into the natural phenomena of our emotional attachment with beauty, love, and connection to each other and our own histories. In these processes and expressions, I hope to understand the concept of an individual's place in the world, with a particular focus on permanence and impermanence of relationships, families, women and their connection to the environment. Through a variety of mediums and artistic, chemical and elemental techniques rooted in conservation with respect for senescence and deterioration, I want the viewer to step into the complex notions of identity.

Impermanence and decay are implicit in our lives and yet we cling to the concert of artificial perfection and youth. The work asks viewers to contemplate their roles in a broader world, their connection to the global community and the ways in which they construct a sense of autonomy within their unique environment.                         

Chlorophyll printing is an alternative photographic process where photographic images are developed on natural leaves through the action of photosynthesis. This organic technique does not use chemicals since the photographs are exposed directly to the sunlight on plants or tree leaves.

The main collection of this exhibition is chlorophyll prints suspended in resin and site specific installations will explore and make visible recent experiences of being in a post pandemic landscape, alongside an awareness of our entanglements to place and nature, our perception of time/immortality.  For me, this means taking time to create work using an ethical and caring framework to discuss our relationship with our destruction, over use and poisoning of the environment. As such, these works are slow, fragile, repetitive, low-tech, analogue print and photographic processes. My interest is in the intimate and ephemeral. The process for the chlorophyll prints is almost ritualistic. The work often has a stillness, a delicate presence in the dark rooms where they take their form.

In addition to the chlorophyll prints additional series will be exhibited including pieces from 999 Problems, but a Bitch ain’t one, which focuses on the white European male gaze and structuring of Art History and museum worthy work.  These individual works are 1000 piece puzzles of recognizable painting often seen to represent “Art.”  The missing piece is representative of women, people of color, visionary artists and primitive artworks. 

The other included works in this show are “Don’t worry I can fix it.”  This series examines childhood literature that models what love or healthy relationships are to American school age children.  However when seen through adult eyes these relationships can be interpreted as abusive, narcissistic, gaslit (gaslighting) or otherwise inappropriate.  This series also ties into previous work with gold, currency, and value with the concept of kintsugi or “golden joinery”. Also known as Kintsukurio, this is a traditional Japanese art of repainting broken or damaged pottery by mending areas with gold, silver or platinum.

Artist’s Bio - Siobhán Byrns

Siobhán Byrns is a Full Professor of Art at the University of Lynchburg and teaches in both the Art Department and the Westover Honors College. 

Siobhán maintains an active artistic career and has participated in numerous one-person and group exhibitions. Her current research stems from sustainable darkroom practices and alternative process techniques that focus on current social and political pressures on women and the environment.

She has an upcoming solo show Signaling Theory opening on March 1, 2024 at Riverviews Artspace, Virginia, and a solo show at the Daura Museum of Art,  Anam Cara in March of 2025.  She is also currently exhibiting at Perspectives Gallery in Chicago for the exhibit LENS 2024.  This spring she will also be participating in an artist residency with the Burren College of Art in Co Clare, Ireland. 

Siobhán received her MFA in photography from the Art Institute of Chicago and received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, focusing both on traditional and time-based new media and photography. While a graduate student, she was formally trained as a fine art restorationist and conservator in some of the country’s most prominent museums. In 2004, while working in the Museum of The Art Institute of Chicago, she assisted in the digital restoration of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.