Biography of Trisha Donnelly
The elusive work of Trisha Donnelly delicately treads the line between materiality and immateriality. Barely leaving traces of their presence, her pieces are often transitory in nature, yet whilst they do not necessarily leave a physical mark in space, they firmly imprint themselves in the mind of the viewer. A typical show of Trisha Donnelly will have sound pieces timed to go off intermittently, making them easy to miss entirely, or a series of pencil drawings that will only be presented as an audio recording of the artist executing them.
Trisha Donnelly's works use the power of suggestion to instill meaning, continually morphing mediums and creating a very particular sense of absent presence. For the project Blind Friends, 2001, Donnelly asked blind people to follow the direction of the wind on a beach, yet all that remains of the finished piece is a photograph of the group of participants onsite. A fragment of a collaboration, barely perceptible in the image presented as the artwork, the piece demonstrates the subtle, quietly radical practice of Trisha Donnelly and demonstrates that not seeing something does not mean that it isn't there. Donnelly's works certainly have weight, if no tangible record.
Born in San Francisco in 1974, Trisha Donnelly was awarded the Central Insurance Prize in Cologne in 2004 and has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Donnelly's work has also been shown at the the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, as well as The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been involved in the Venice Biennale (2003, 2011, 2013), and documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012).
