TEXTILE SCULPTURE
2026
Drawing on Hito Steyerl’s idea of the poor image, Síofra is interested in images that lose resolution, status and stability through circulation. Poor images tend towards abstraction; they are copied, compressed, edited and redistributed, carrying the traces of that movement with them. Steyerl connects visual clarity and focus to systems of value and privilege, while degraded images register acceleration, displacement and the pressures of audiovisual capitalism. By translating this fast, unstable image into the deliberately slow process of hand knitting, she uses making as a way to interrupt those conditions. Síofra is interested in the possibility of the poor image as a resistant, non-conforming form, and in slowing it down as a way of imagining alternatives to systems built around speed, hierarchy and consumption. The work proposes attention, labour, participation and care as another way of producing and circulating images.
Síofra Egan is a Dublin-based visual artist and 2024 Fine Art Sculpture graduate from NCAD. Her Master’s in Archives and Records Management from UCD (2026) informs her consideration of how knowledge is classified, described, preserved and made accessible. Archival processes have heightened her awareness of the structures that determine what is retained, circulated or excluded, and how missing context can alter the meaning of an image, object or record. This connects to her interest in fragmented information, systems of organisation and the authority involved in representing and interpreting knowledge.
She works across digital and physical forms, combining photogrammetry, knitting, drawing and sculpture to explore the relationship between images, information and material processes.
Recent exhibitions include NEW WAVE at Outset Gallery (2025), Through and Between at Douglas Hyde Gallery (2025), and Peripheries Open at Gorey School of Art (2026).