Anna Spearman makes sculptural objects and installations.  Her studio is a testing ground, where her day-to-day encounters with the material world are filtered through a kind of three dimensional meandering.  Using a range of materials and processes, and working instinctively and spontaneously, she attempts to transpose the joy and excitement of her day-to-day encounters into three dimensional forms and installations.

This newly commissioned work by Roscommon Arts Centre draws on the theory of Loose Parts developed by Simon Nicholson in 1971. This theory promotes the importance of open ended and creative play in early childhood experience. This is achieved through the provision of ‘loose parts’- objects or materials which can be moved, combined, redesigned, reimagined, taken apart and put back together in multiple ways. In the context of this exhibition, ‘loose parts’ can be taken to designate objects and materials with no prescribed function or meaning, whose assembled form is only one of many possible configurations.

Anna’s practice explores how sculptural objects, the space around them and the viewer in that space interact as vital elements in a temporal and performative experience. She is interested in how this installation requires us to take a journey, that involves an accumulation of different views and meanings unfolding over space and time.

Anna Spearman currently works at a studio in The Model, Sligo. She has an MA in Fine Art: Contemporary Practice from Falmouth University, a BA in Fine Art from Sligo IT and a BA in History of Art and Sociology from Trinity College Dublin. She has had solo exhibitions in the Customs House Gallery in Westport and the Hyde Bridge Gallery in Sligo.

The 2021 Visual Art programme, curated by Naomi Draper, continues to explore the potential of relationships between humans and other matter through a series of related events and engagement opportunities. As part of Anna’s exhibition this engagement involves investigating the materials, objects and processes once vital to our everyday and domestic encounters through the craft of rushwork.  Using materials harvested from our local landscape and sharing a traditional practice of making, local craftsperson Patricia O’Flaherty will share her craft through a one-day basket making course. Details to be announced here soon.

Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland