Pippa Sibert –
Certain places can be familiar to us, even when we know we have never seen them before.
Such fleeting glimmers of recognition can penetrate the heart deeply, evoking what John Berger once described as ‘the gasp of home.’
Pippa Sibert’s practise explores these moments and encounters. Through painting, collage, found objects, sculptural interventions, book works and prints, she carefully weaves and part-conceals the traces of memory, of the encounters with the mundane and the beautiful, with the birdsong, plants and trees. When seen as a whole, her depictions of these encounters awaken us to what the writer and philosopher John O’Donohue once called the ‘primal affection,’ the source of love.
Home and Love – these are the pillars which support and inspire Sibert’s creative enquiry. For love prompts our ability to imagine, and, when we are given the space to imagine we make a home.
When we encounter works such as ‘By the light of the moon,’ we are offered a chance to remember the source of love from another past, how it was conceived, how it was betrayed, how it was forsaken, how it was redeemed.
In the 21st Century, a predominantly humanist and rationalist perspective means that such notions are often ridiculed. But vague impressions of the presence of a universal Love still manage to arouse us. It can happen at the end of the evening, when rooks come home to roost, or early in the morning when dawn-light seeps through blinds: we remember that quieter truths exist, truths we know about in theory but perhaps have forgotten to live by in practise. Sibert’s work stirs our languid imaginations into remembering these sacred truths. The sky may be darkening, but the door still opens, the door goes on opening.
Ciara Healy
February 2016