Siobhán McDonald
The week the sun touched the earth

The Centre Culturel Irlandais is delighted to present this exhibition of paintings on vellum, lithographs, film projections, seeds and objects by artist Siobhán McDonald.

Siobhán is fascinated by natural phenomena such as the solar storm Aurora Borealis, and how to give artistic form to intangible scientific processes. Her work presented in the CCI’s Old Library explores ancient and future solar storms in Ireland by bringing together echoes from different fields – quotations, mythology and language from the historic chronicles known as The Irish Annals, as well as contemporary dance and empirical cosmic data.

For five years, Siobhán has been working with scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) and Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) to artistically evoke some of the Sun's finest unseen moments, past, present and future. In parallel, the artist has searched for traces of volcanic eruptions and sun storms recorded in the Irish Annals that chronicled major events in Ireland up to the 17th century.

At 5.30pm on the evening of the opening, Siobhán McDonald is in conversation with artist George Bolster (see details of his CCI exhibition here) and Professor Peter Gallagher, Head of Astrophysics at the DIAS and a member of the ESA-NASA science team that launched Solar Orbiter in 2020 to journey to hitherto unexplored parts of the Sun.