Siobhan Magee’s Biography

Siobhan Magee was born in Banbridge, Co Down in 1961. In 1986 following an inspirational visit to Donegal she left the Northern Ireland Civil Service, where she had worked for eight years, to pursue a career in Art.

After attending the University of Ulster in Belfast, where she achieved a commendation infoundation studies, she went to Canterbury college of Art, where she graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art.

On leaving college she joined a group of professional sculptors living and working near Canterbury, where she remained for three years, exhibiting regularly in the Kent and London area. Her final exhibition before leaving Canterbury, held at the Canterbury Museum and Art

Gallery, consisted of a series of marble and plaster carvings, relief and 3D. These were based on still life, particularly the form of the chalice. These sculptures had a pure, silent stillness, suspended in time.

At this point she decided to take time out to travel around Italy to study the Art and Architecture. Based in Florence she spent the next two years visiting the many galleries and Architectural sites, particularly, Romanesque churches.

Returning to London she proceeded to complete a series of lime stone carvings, influenced by the silence and serenity of the Romanesque church. A number of these sculptures were later exhibited in the Iontas Small Works Exhibition 1995.

In 1996 Siobhan returned home to Co Down, where, inspired by the Mourne Mountains she returned to painting. The resulting paintings consisted of watercolours painted on site, capturing the colour, atmosphere and structure of the mountains and oils painted over many months in the studio. The images have been fined down to the bare essentials, using a limited palate of colours to capture the stillness, silence and powerful impact created by the interlocking forms of the mountains, broken only by a stone wall winding through the mountains, a winter shadow spreading across the landscape or the glistening of the sun on the rock face or quarry.

A selection of these paintings have since been exhibited in the Royal Ulster Academy show.

Siobhan continues to live and work in Banbridge.