Siobhan Hapaska’s overriding themes include how binary opposites, from an intimate reading to something impersonal, can support or undermine our sense of hope and change how we see our world. Following her MA at Goldsmiths Siobhan started to create work which was difficult to categorize, a polar opposite to the ‘readymades’ which she felt were forcing the audience to scan and make instant appraisals. She made super fluid sculptures with impossibly perfect surfaces to induce a cultural amnesia and which she hoped would slow down the experience of actually looking and juxtaposed them with hyper real, figurative works to sabotage their associations. Never interested in the notions of serial production her work can visually leap from one show to the next and from one piece to the next.
Siobhan has had solo shows in New York, London, Dublin, Tokyo and Cardiff and exhibited in the Irish Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. Three years later Siobhan won the Paul Hamlyn award in 2004.