Seán Vicary
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Biography
Seán Vicary works across moving image, animation and digital media.
His practice explores ideas at the heart of our relationship with the ‘natural’ world, place and landscape (internal and external); investigating links between the subjective, scientific and historical aspects, especially those that are obscure or concealed.
Active research is integral to his creative process and he frequently works with primary sources to shape his understanding and inform explorations of contemporary mythos. Also central is a hybrid process of haptic and digital crafting, where the temporal manipulation inherent in stop-motion animation is used to examine the agency of materials and our entanglement with more than human processes and timescales.
Seán often works place-sensitively; collecting found objects and fragments of detritus, then manipulating these elements in a virtual space to create animated assemblages. These act as triggers for the viewer, sometimes suggestive of a wider narrative or hidden processes at play behind the visible.
Seán is a regular exhibitor at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, previously winning the Design and Craft prize in 2011, the Ifor Davies Award in 2016 and the Gold Medal for Fine Art in 2022.
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Works
Seán Vicary
Sitelines,2022 Gold Medal for Fine Art
HD Video & Animation, 10 mins 25 secs
Edition of 5 (4 available)
Copyright The ArtistSitelines is a response to Alan Garner’s cult novel The Owl Service. Initially developed as part of a collaborative deep-mapping project, over time the project grew to become increasingly reflexive...Sitelines is a response to Alan Garner’s cult novel The Owl Service. Initially developed as part of a collaborative deep-mapping project, over time the project grew to become increasingly reflexive with a weird folding of the artist into the work.
“I grew up with Garner’s early novels. Looking back I can see how they suggested a framework for mapping my own childhood boundaries: defined by ditch, field and hedgerow. But the Owl Service was something else.
Initially slightly too young for the book, my introduction in the 1970’s was via the TV adaptation.
I’m not sure I ever recovered.”
Seán Vicary explores the novel’s idea of the valley as a charged ‘reservoir’ for unseen forces but also as a driver for Garner’s (and consequentially his own) creative process; the immersion of oneself in a landscape/ place providing a conduit and the act of creation a channelling of those forces.
“I spent two years researching and working on location in the valley. I’ve collected, photographed and animated objects, including horsehair & lime plaster, handmade nails and a witch bottle. All these have a resonance with their place of origin and the haptic stop-motion animation process became an almost ritualistic invocation of sympathetic magic, creating a ‘receiver’ for tuning into residual wavelengths and decoding any hauntological transmissions.”
Sitelines won the Gold Medal for Fine Art in Tregaron in 2022
2022 Tregaron Ceredigion
Gold Medal for Fine ArtSitelines
Gold Medal for Fine Art 2022
HD animation and video
10 minutes 20 secs
Sitelines is a response to Alan Garner’s cult novel The Owl Service. Initially developed as part of a collaborative deep-mapping project, over time the project grew to become increasingly reflexive with a weird folding of the artist into the work.
“I grew up with Garner’s early novels. Looking back I can see how they suggested a framework for mapping my own childhood boundaries: defined by ditch, field and hedgerow. But the Owl Service was something else.
Initially slightly too young for the book, my introduction in the 1970’s was via the TV adaptation.
I’m not sure I ever recovered.”
Seán Vicary explores the novel’s idea of the valley as a charged ‘reservoir’ for unseen forces but also as a driver for Garner’s (and consequentially his own) creative process; the immersion of oneself in a landscape/ place providing a conduit and the act of creation a channelling of those forces.
“I spent two years researching and working on location in the valley. I’ve collected, photographed and animated objects, including horsehair & lime plaster, handmade nails and a witch bottle. All these have a resonance with their place of origin and the haptic stop-motion animation process became an almost ritualistic invocation of sympathetic magic, creating a ‘receiver’ for tuning into residual wavelengths and decoding any hauntological transmissions.”
In 2022 Sitelines won the Gold Medal for Fine art at The National Eisteddfod of Wales; Y Lle Celf selector Peter Wakelin said the work “can be seen as continuing a neo-romantic tradition since the 1930s related to the landscape of Wales while being absolutely of the present and future in exploring the opportunities of new media.”
Sitelines was also awarded the Contemporary Art Society of Wales Purchase Prize and acquired by The National Library of Wales for its permanent collection of public art.
AUR Artists
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