Frances Hegarty - brief biography

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.

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: Frances Hegarty: Exhibitions, Screenings, Awards and Commissions (CV/resumé) [.pdf]

Hegarty/Hegarty & Stones hub: http://www.brighter.org