Dan Shipsides
'Pata-perception: perceive-something, recognise-nothing, conceive-anything, cognise-everything.
I would describe my practice as a creative form of geography. I am interested in a creative, imaginative and critical relationship to our cultural, biotic and material environment in all and any of its potential manifestations – phenomenological, ecological, socio-political, topographical, It stems from a deep belief that art generates and offers a rich, nuanced and essential form of knowledge, albeit elusive and multivalent and potentially nonsensical, of where and what we are, what became and what might become.
Since 2004, as Shipsides and Beggs Projects, I have also been collaborating with Neal Beggs, an artist based in northern France.
Our co-practice exploits the dynamic interdependence established between people climbing together, where being joined through necessity by a rope, becomes a model for co-creative practice. Through this we have a mutual freedom to dialogically share, combine and mutate our interests.
A significant body of recent work has emerged out of leftfield° explorations of borderlands, summits and edge-lands. Within this, came a realisation that the porosity and fluidity of borders might conceptually prefigure ‘otherworlds’ or adjacent possibilities aside from those mapped as matter of fact. For example, Where the Lines End is a road/water-trip engagement with the Irish border, creating musical resonances based on the altitudinal data of the border which are hybridised with a multitude of other types of ‘data’, such as stories, encounters, traditions, personal histories, Covid’s R numbers and the layering of states and counties.
Another related project creates star-maps of a mythical firmament of constellations inversely configured from ordnance-survey maps of the borderlands in question. This embracing of hybridity, inversion and necessity, of how we might understand, imagine and inhabit our fluid borderlands, consequently leading to me making a hybrid boat we called, Sheebang.
° I would prefer the term ‘pata-perceptual’ here to describe their approach, whereas Neal suggested ‘leftfield’, but wasn’t inclined to use any adjective, preferring the assumption that it is ‘just what artists do’. I agree with that, but feel in an era of instrumentalised art making, there is cognitive mileage in invoking the methodological anarchy, imagination and playfulness of ‘pata-physics. Either way the compromise of ‘leftfield’ is a no less complicated alternative.
Contact Information
website: https://danshipsides.com/
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danshipsides
Professional Practice & Experience
2024
The Shape of a Pocket, Catalyst Arts. Curated by Chris Hanlon and Dougal Mckenzie
Artist Boatbuilders. In Conversation Shipsides / Bloomer / Carr, PS2 / DRIFT, Belfast 24
SHEEBANG: Exploring Traditional Boats with... National Museums Ireland, Our Heritage Life blog
Drawing as Nature, SECA. Public plein-air drawing workshops and exhibition, April / May 2024 (ongoing)
2023
Gospel of the Swamp Things, Shipsides and Beggs Projects. ABRIDGED Projects, Derry
Connecting with Nature, SECA. Public plein-air drawing workshops, Belfast
ha ha Syzygetically Speaking, Cathedral Quarter Art Festival, public artworks, Belfast
ha ha Syzygetic Summitt Stammers (Bearnagh), Green Room / Black Box, Belfast
Amalgama, group show. ADEMA / Fundación Barceló, Palma, Mallorca, Spain
2022
Syzygetic Experiment No. 5, Dan Shipsides and friends. Tivoli Fringe Festival, Belfast
2021
What We Didn’t Know Was…, Dan Shipsides / Shipsides & Beggs Projects. Fenderesky Gallery
From Deep Blue to Pale Blue, BBC Radio 3 commissioned podcast
Portrait of Northern Ireland: Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto, group show commissioned by the NI Office. Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast