SYLWIA MIGDAL
PROFILE
I am a research-based artist, educator, project coordinator and youth worker. Originally from Kraków, Poland. For the past seventeen years living in a small coastal village called Glandore in West Cork. Experienced in the knowledge of contemporary and conceptual art practices. My current research is sound and moving images based, exploring unseen deep water environments using hydrophobic recording devices to build an archive of non-visual evidence of micro-changes in the sea environments.
KEY SKILLS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
ARTISTIC
Knowledge of research, issue-based art practice and development of visual and sound art projects. Excellent knowledge of contemporary and conceptual art practice. Experienced with consulting and working with young people in an educational environment. Experienced in coordinating youth art projects.
DIGITAL SKILLS
Sound, video, image Editing software, 3D Design and modelling software, Projector Mapping, Virtual Learning Platform using VR Oculus, Coding using Audrino, Datasets and sound visualisation software. In 2022 Awarded one year of Art Residency in Digital Arts Studios (DAS) Future Labs Foundation, Belfast, UK.
LANGUAGES
Polish - native, English - fluent, Russian - basic, Ukrainian - basic, good understanding of Slavic languages.
CORE QUALIFICATION
2020-2022 MASTER’S DEGREE IN ART AND ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY DUBLIN, SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS. (SHERKIN ISLAND)
Curriculum and Key Modules:
Mapping the Environment; Histories and Theories of Environment, Environmental Humanities, Cognitive Mapping, Island Studies, Interdisciplinary Practice.
Sensing the Environment; Artistic Research, Eco-socially Engaged Art, Environmental Fieldwork and Citizen Science. Island Studies, Informal Pedagogies.
Hacking the Environment; Event Studies, Hacking as Acting, Hacking as Adopting, Project Management, Project Realisation.
Graduation Art Project: Translations. Research-based, sound installation focusing on unseen deep water environments, using hydro-phonic microphones and Marine data- sets. The research was inspired by Hydro-feminism strategies that support deep speculation and imaging of our sea environment. Translations capture the slow, imperceptible destructiveness of the biosphere in the Anthropocene.
MA Thesis Re-thinking Aesthetics of Environment - Eco-gnosis, Toxic Sublimity and the Crisis of Human Perception, in Work of Benjamin Skop, Amund Bentsen and Edward Burtynsky.
2016-2020 BACHELOR AWARD IN VISUAL ARTS, TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY DUBLIN, SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS
Curriculum and Key Modules:
Critical Theory, Socially Engaged Art Practice, Issues Based Art, Collaborative Projects, Professional Art Practice.
Graduation Art Project: In the Blink of My Ear. VR installation reflected transitional spaces throughout the native woodlands of West Cork, Ireland. Final artwork aimed to give a voice to nature that has been lost through the official oppressive course of climate change. The project was created through digital media technology to visualise sound, thus a visual component of the sound was sound itself.
BA Thesis Visualising the Anthropocene, Aesthetics and (An)Aesthetics in work of Photographer Edward Burtynsky and Activist Group: Extinction Rebellion.
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
2022 - Present, Art Project Coordinator, Administrator, LGBTI+ Youth Worker, Art Project Developer, Artist Facilitator - Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland.
2020 Artist Facilitator, Online painting workshops, Cork County Council, Ireland.
2015-2019 FOH Administrator, Gallery Assistant, Community Employment Scheme, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
2023 - 2024 Build a Wooden Boat, Community Art Project, a long-term project with an artist in the community, a proposal for Belfast 2024, with Jane Morrow PhD. Application in process. Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2022 Coordinator of multidisciplinary Art Youth Project: ‘Freedom’, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland.
2022 Glandore Regatta, Volunteer, Glandore, West Cork, Ireland.
2021 - present, Seabed Sanctuary, Underwater Sculpture Garden, Schull, West Cork, Ireland. Seabed Sanctuary is a not-for-profit collective of independent practitioners concerned with biodiversity loss in our coastal waters.
2019-2020 Seminars and Planting Trees, The Manch Project, Green Economy Foundation.
https://greeneconomyfoundation.ie/
2017 Help For Kelp, Fundraising Project, Bantry, Ireland. Fundraising exhibition to help protect Bantry Bay (Ireland) from over-harvesting Kelp.
EXHIBITIONS AND SYMPOSIUMS
2023 Future Labs, Art Residency Exhibition, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Upcoming exhibition to mark the end of the residency in Digital Arts Studios. The showcase mainly focused on digital media, projection mapping and moving images.
2022 Members and Friends Exhibition, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland. Annual show of members of the local community arts centre.
2022 Idir Sholas, MA Art and Environment Graduation Show, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland.
2021 Sensing the Environment, Art and the West Cork Archipelago, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland.
2021 Virtual Reality Installation as part of a VR Conference, ELIA Future Arts: Towards a Virtual University of the Arts.
2020 Intertidal, BA Visual Arts Graduation Show, Sherkin Island and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland.
2020 GRADEX, Dublin School of Creative Arts, Graduation Show, Technological University Dublin, Ireland.
2020 Imagining an Island, In this Day and Age, Virtual Symposium, Art School at UHI, North Uist, Scotland, UK.
2020 Imagining an Island, Taiga Chearsabhagh Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland, UK.
2019 Story of a Single Tree, Site-specific seminar with the forester and artist Ian Wright, Myross Woods, Leap, West Cork, Ireland.
2019 Members and Friends Exhibition, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland.
2019 Sounding the Anthropocene, Open Ear Electronic Music Festival, Sherkin Island, Ireland.
2017 Regions, foyer Exhibition, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland. 2016 Members and Friends Exhibition, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen,
RESIDENCIES
2022-2023 Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Future Labs, Belfast Northern Ireland.
https://www.digitalartsstudios.com/
2019 IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art, mini-residency in response to their permanent collection with artists: Barbara Knezevic, Jesse Jones and John Beattie, Dublin, Ireland.
RESOURCES
Donna Haraway; Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham and London. 2006
Nicolas Mirzoeff; How to See the World, A Pelican introduction UK 2015.
T.J. Demos; Against the Anthropocene, Visual Culture and Environment Today, Sternberg Press, 2016.
Jedediah Purdy; After Nature, A Politics for the Anthropocene, Harvard University Press, 2015.
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey; Allegories for the Anthropocene, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2019.
Jan Jagodziński; Interrogating the Anthropocene, Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy and the Future in Question, Palgrave Macmillan, Canada 2018.
Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin; Art in the Anthropocene, Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemologies, Open Humanities Press, London 2015.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Penguin Books, New York, 1962.
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They Communicate, Greystone Books, Vancouver / Berkeley 2015.
Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, Open Humanities Press, London 2018
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Bloomsbury, London 2013
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Polity Press 2019
Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis, Thinking with Water, McGill-Queen's University Press 2013 Astrida Neimanis, Body of Water, Bloomsbury Academic 2017
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press 2011.