This website provides some (haphazard) information on selected projects and artworks from 1996 to today.
For those not familiar with my work here is a quick introduction through these artworks and projects:
Dan Shipsides
ha ha - Summit Stammers
THREE POINTS DOWN TO ZERO
What We Didn't Know Was
6 Star
MORTAR | DEVICE
Rochers à Fontainebleau
Touchstone (Echo Valley / A Guiding Dilemma)f
The Stone Bridge
Sorry
SHIPSIDES AND BEGGS PROJECTS (co-authoring partnership)
WHERE THE LINES END
ANOTHER FINE MESS
THE LAMENT OF THE ACCOLADE TREE
DECIMATION in A Flat and F Minor
THE IRON WAY
The Alphabet Climb
BIVACCO
Still Not Out Of The Woods
YUPA STAR
RED FLOWERS ROUNDABOUT
Pata-perception: perceive-something, recognise-nothing, conceive-anything, cognise-everything.
I would describe my practice as a creative form of geography. I am interested in a creative, imaginative and critical relationship to our cultural, biotic and material environment in all and any of its potential manifestations – ecological, phenomenological, socio-political, topographical. It stems from a deep belief that art generates and offers rich, nuanced and essential forms of knowledge, albeit elusive and multivalent, of where and what we are, what became and what might become.
Since 2004 as Shipsides and Beggs Projects, I have also been collaborating with Neal Beggs, an Irish artist based in northern France. Our co-practice exploits the dynamic interdependence established between people climbing together, where being joined through necessity by a rope, becomes a model for co-creative practice. Through this we have a mutual freedom to dialogically share, combine and mutate our interests in a way which is mutually entangled in the phenomenological and cultural specificities of place.
A significant body of recent work has emerged out of leftfield° explorations of borderlands, summits and edge-lands. Within this, came a realisation that the porosity and fluidity of borders might conceptually prefigure ‘otherworlds’ or adjacent possibilities aside from those mapped as matter of fact. For example, Where the Lines End is a road/water-trip engagement with the Irish ‘border’, creating musical resonances based on the altitudinal data of the border which are hybridised with a multitude of other types of ‘data’, such as stories, encounters, traditions, personal histories, Covid’s R numbers and the layering of states and counties.
Another related project creates star-maps of a mythical firmament of constellations inversely configured from ordnance-survey maps of the borderlands in question. This embracing of hybridity, inversion and necessity, of how we might understand, imagine and inhabit our fluid borderlands, consequently leading to me making a boat we called, Sheebang.
° I would prefer the term ‘pata-perceptual’ here to describe their approach, whereas Neal suggested ‘leftfield’, but isn’t inclined to use any adjective, preferring the assumption that it is ‘just what artists do’. I agree with that, but feel in an era of instrumentalised art making, there is cognitive mileage in invoking the methodological anarchy, imagination and playfulness of ‘pata-physics. Either way the compromise of ‘leftfield’ is a no less complicated alternative. Biog:
Dan Shipsides is an artist and researcher based in Orchid Studios and also a senior lecturer at the Belfast School of Art where he is the director of the MFA Fine Art programme. As an artist he works individually and within collaborative dynamics, notably that of Shipsides and Beggs Projects.
Shipsides was awarded the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival award in 2023 (ha ha - Syzygetically Speaking). In 2017 he completed a moving image commission (Three Points Down to Zero) supported by AEMI and Dublin Docklands in 2017. He was awarded an AHRC Landscape and Environment Award in 2026 (Touchstone Testpiece), ACNI Major Artist Award in 2004 (Lateral Practice and Climbing), in 2000 won the Nissan Art Award IMMA (Bamboo Support) Dublin and 1998 won the Perspective award, OBG, Belfast (The Stone Bridge).
He (inc. with Shipsides and Beggs Projects) has exhibited nationally and internationally including; CQAF, Belfast (ha ha - Syzygetically Speaking), American University Museum - Katzen Gallery (Another Fine Mess), La Cuisine, France (The Lament of the Accolade Tree), L'Orangerie Bastogne, Belgium (Still not out of the Woods), Microclima (Venice Biennale collateral - The Iron Way), ACCA, Melbourne (Desire Lines), The MAC, Belfast (Still not out of the Woods), South London Gallery (Games & Theory), Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (Radical Architecture), Wings Project Art Space, Switzerland (Performance), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (Elastic Frontiers), Konsthall C, Stockholm, Sweden (Under plattan, ängen!), Platform Guranti, Istanbul (Hit & Run), Confederation Gallery, PEI, Canada (Beauty Queens), HEDAH, Maastricht (Rochers à Fontainebleau), Riga Sculpture Quadrennial, Latvia (European Space), Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (Beta), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (Pioneers), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (Sporting Life). Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (Endure), Melbourne International Biennial, Australia (Signs of Life).
Gratefully acknowledging the support of:
The Ulster University Ulster Aryt and Design Research Institute
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI)
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Opinions within this website are my own and do not reflect those of funders, employers or anybody else.
