Siân Torrington is an artist from New Zealand, Aotearoa, who makes drawings, sculptures
and installations. Her work has been widely shown in galleries, festivals, and commissioned
for public spaces. She uses diverse materials to create structural forms which are expressive,
embodied and grounded in practice-based experimentation. Her work is experiential,
requiring the viewer to move around, through and inside, asking their bodies to respond in
space. Siân’s work is drippy and colourful, stuck and woven together, leaning and clinging to
existing structures, or building its own in defiance of straight lines and the upright.
Siân has been artist in residence for 3 months at 1 Shanthi Road, generously funded by The
Asia New Zealand Foundation. She has researched everyday skills and vernacular structures,
as well as local forms of arrangement; how things are hung up in shops or stacked building
materials. A particular focus of the project has been being a woman in India, and how to
express her femme identity in a new culture. How to find a place for it.
Skill-based, everyday making, such as flower-tying and bamboo- weaving have been a way
to connect with local practices of making.
“I want to make my own kind of offering towards these incredible skills which I see
everywhere. Skills that are a part of every-day life here. Skills which do not make people
rich. Skills which are hard to learn, and essential to life. To join together, beautify, bless,
carry and build.”
Siân is extremely grateful and humbled to be taught new skills, work with, and be gifted
materials by local women. This project includes the generous labour, teaching and time of
women without whom she would have remained adrift. Their conversations, humour,
sharing and openness have enabled her to weave her own way in and find connections in a
place that is completely new. This show is dedicated to them, and to female struggles,
community, expression and daily lives, everywhere.
See more of her work and read her blog about her residency here;
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