Floating Body
Siobhán McDonald is an Irish artist based in Dublin. In a practice that emphasizes field work and collaboration she works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. Through painting, film, sound and sculpture McDonald explores Dublin Port as a gateway of exchange—reimagined as a porous space of interspecies cohabitation. This haunting journey along the wetland—located on the edges of the port—is a breathing, living system that is able to respond to sea level rise.
Siobhán McDonald: Floating Body (2025) National Monuments Service, Govt of Ireland.
Siobhan McDonald was born in New York and lives in Ireland. She works with natural materials, removing them from their cycles of growth and decay to create reflections on our place in geological time. Her practice explores the relationship between people and the natural world. Using natural phenomena she weaves diverse narratives into visual stories, inviting nature itself to take part in the creative process. Her distinctive artistic language makes intangible processes visible through painting, drawing, film, and sound.
An exhibition of Siobhan’s work will be held at the Upcoming exhibition at The Oceans & Biennale des Arts et de l’Océan at Villa Arson on the occasion of the UN Ocean Conference in Nice (June 5–16, 2025)
The project is curated by María Montero Sierra, TBA21–Academy and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21–Academy), a leading international art and advocacy foundation founded in 2002 by philanthropist Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, in collaboration with Villa Arson, the pioneering French cultural institution
Can ports—once gateways of exchange—be reimagined as porous spaces of interspecies cohabitation?
Siobhán McDonald: Floating Body (2025) National Monuments Service, Govt of Ireland.
Shapeshifter is a project that explores Dublin Port as a gateway of exchange—reimagined as a porous space of interspecies cohabitation. The central theme unfolds around Dublin’s history as a wetland and the mythologies it holds as well as its future. Water assumes a central role in its metaphorical dimension, but also as a carrier of measurable data.
McDonald was awarded a commission by the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS4Water II initiative. Following nine months of research and immersion, she is now exploring the wetland as a biological system—one that connects more-than-human planetary networks with the city’s underground waterways.
Shapeshifter brings together new works in film, painting, sculpture and installation, tracing different temporal and material states of water.
The heart of the presentation unfolds around a shipwreck, filmed while submerged beneath the sea. The film traces Dublin Port’s layered identities through cultural, historical, and anthropological lenses. Depicting streams, rivers and oceans as planetary networks, it navigates submerged landscapes, and the shifting boundaries of coastal erosion—ultimately posing questions about our relationship to water, memory, and the future. The image of the sea appears as a metaphor, ever moving and changing its form, relentless and elusive but also timeless and constant.
This haunting journey from wetland to shoreline — navigates a two hundred year slice of underwater time through a fluid and multifaceted lens, spanning scientific, cultural, and historical perspectives. The film Floating Body captures a vivid revelation of a shipwreck to reveal precarious balance at a pivotal moment in rising sea levels. It lies just outside the formal boundaries of Dublin Port, on Pormarnock—a 19th-century fishing vessel buried beneath the sand for over 200 years.
Boats carry much more than their manifests describe. Boats bring ports with them, creating new inter-place dynamics everywhere they dock.
The works, foremost realised in painting, are made on repurposed materials layered with natural materials such as sediment – a reference to the ongoing crisis of global sustainability.
PAINTINGS
A series of paintings made from limestone, sediment and crushed shells locally sourced from the coastline region – evoking the once-flourishing port’s wetland that covered the region for over 300 years. Materials and forms in oil paint are evocative of environmental processes that shape landscapes in transition, with edges and seascapes in motion. These places exist in endless flux, attuned to tidal rhythms – dissolving salt marshes into a series of indeterminate hydrological visions of space, time, and existence.
The project enters into dialogue with a 10th-century Book of Psalms containing Hebrew songs and poems. The presence of Egyptian papyrus in its binding provides the first tangible evidence of trade or contact facilitated by boats between Ireland and the broader world, linking Irish ports to the Mediterranean highlighting the historical significance of Irish ports as gateways of cultural and economic exchange.
‘The Last Page, Psalm 150’ is the final surviving letters of a manuscript buried in a bog for 1,300 years – an exploration of types of darkness in a bog that uses light and plants to expose the forces of nature that preserved it.
‘In the Valley of Tears’ explores the relationship between bogs and their natural preservative properties, drawing on the Faddan More Psalter—a 1,300-year-old book of Psalms unearthed from a wetland in 2006. It contains Hebrew prayers and poems. The anaerobic environment preserved sections of the book while leaving voids untouched by time. The paradox of presence and absence is central to the work: the iron gall ink in the Psalter acted as a preservative, allowing individual letters to survive, suspended in the organic material. Material traces of fragments speak as much to the passage of time as the surviving text itself, highlighting the delicate balance of nature and memory.
‘The last Page” will bring together hummed versions of the book of psalms. Each song will be performed by Abbey monks as a durational score in 2026.
Lungs | Inhale, exhale Dimensions, 12 cm x 10 cm each Porous layers of calcium carbonate Siobhan McDonald 2025
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Siobhan McDonald will speak at the opening event of the UN Nations Conference and screen the film to an audience of policymakers and mayors from global port cities. The session will be chaired by Édouard Philippe, President of the World Mayors Network.
This second edition of S+T+ARTS4Water, titled Ports in Transformation, is made possible through a consortium of cultural and scientific partners including TBA21–Academy, WAAG, Gluon, PINA, and more. As a central actor in the project, they continue a commitment to oceanic research and advocacy through new residencies and collaborations in Ocean Space (Venice) and online via Ocean-Archive.org.
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Floating Body is part of Shapeshifter – a S+T+ARTS4Water II commission. Its premiere presentation at TBA21 is supported by Culture Ireland. The project was commissioned within the framework of the S+T+ARTS 4Water II residency programme by ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University and Beta Festival with the support of Dublin Port Company, Dublin City Council, Smart Dublin, Waterways Ireland, the Irish Maritime Development Office and the S+T+ARTS programme of the European Union.
The show is curated by María Montero Sierra, and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary a leading international art and advocacy foundation created in 2002 by the philanthropist Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Villa Arson, the pioneering French cultural institution.
With thanks to filmmaker José Miguel Jiménez, Dublin Port Company, and the National Monuments Service, Government of Ireland.
This project was realised in the context of STARTS4WaterII, with the support of BETA Festival and ADAPT in Ireland.
Photo credit: Sean Breithaupt
Composer: David Stalling
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All images copyright and courtesy of Siobhan McDonald
TBA21
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