Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones - brief biography, June 2007

Frances Hegarty was born in Teelin, Co. Donegal, Ireland, later emigrating to Scotland. She now lives in Sheffield, England and Co. Donegal and is Emeritus Professor of Sheffield Hallam University. Her work as an artist spans three decades: at times concerned with received ideas of cultural and national identity, with emigration, with the female body and mortality. She works with video, audio, photographs, drawing and installation, exhibiting worldwide.

The video works Turas (Journey) and Gold were included in the survey exhibitions Beyond the Pale (IMMA Dublin 1995), Distant Relations (London, Dublin, Santa Monica, Mexico City, 1996-97) and L’Imaginaire Irlandais (Paris 1996). Her video installation Voice Over, based on interviews with four Bosnian women displaced by events in the former Yugoslavia, was shown in the U.K. and Ireland during 1995-96. In 1995 her photographic installation Point of View was installed at Heathrow Airport for one year. Video tapes and installations from her Auto Portrait series have been show widely in Britain and Ireland, Europe, Brazil, Australia and the United States, and purchased for collections. The Model and Niland Gallery, Sligo hosted a solo retrospective exhibition, accompanied by a published monograph, in 2004.

Andrew Stones was born in Sheffield, England. He has worked as an artist since 1984, receiving many awards and commissions, and undertaking residencies and fellowships. As a NESTA Fellow from 2001-04, he visited science establishments such as Arecibo Radio Observatory (Puerto Rico), Big Bear Solar Observatory (California) and CERN (Switzerland/France). He also writes, particularly on subjects related to the core concerns of his work: the untidy collisions of art, science, nature and technology which occur in everyday life. He expresses enjoyment in these entanglements, and a concern with the ways in which knowledge, history, authority and power become linked and politicised.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s Stones presented a series of large-scale installations including Class, Geiger, and The Conditions, and single-tape video works, including A History of Disaster with Marvels (Channel 4 Television, 1992). He works extensively with video and audio, more recently presenting gallery and site-specific projects throughout the UK and in Europe, including Accumulator (Commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory, Cork, 2003) Atlas (Chisenhale, London, and Copenhagen, 2004) and Tell Us Everything (Royal Institution, London, 2003). An artist’s book Outside Inside was published by Film and Video Umbrella, London in 2004. In 2007 Stones continued his engagement with digital photography with the exhibition, Midnight at Wildbrow Hall, at Peri Gallery, Turku, and a residency in the Finnish archipeligo.

Beginning with For Dublin in 1997 (Irish Museum of Modern Art /Nissan Art Project) Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones established a collaborative practice centred on large scale, site-specific, temporary works bringing elements of illusion, temporal play, humour and disquiet to public locations. They have been commissioned to make site-specific works in the cities of Sheffield (Seemingly So Evidently Not Apparently Then, Site Gallery 1998), Birmingham (Orienteer (A-Z, Dawn to Dusk) Ikon Gallery 2000), Belfast (Overnight Sensation, Ormeau Baths Gallery 2001) and Bradford (Extra, Bradford Film Office 2003).

In 2005 Hegarty & Stones were commissioned to produce a new work for Visualise Carlow: Ex Machina was presented in Carlow in 2006. Tactically Yours, a gallery installation occupying four rooms, was shown at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2007. These works consolidate some of the formal qualities evident in their earlier collaborative projects, and pursue a concern with the boundary between the personal and the political.

Download: this statement [.pdf] - Frances Hegarty CV / resumé [.pdf] - Andrew Stones CV / resumé [.pdf]

Artists’ archives: http://www.brighter.org