Ciara Phillips is an Irish & Canadian artist born in 1976 in Ottawa, Canada. She studied for a Bachelor of Fine Art at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada from 1996 to 2000, and graduated with a Master in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 2004.
Phillips uses printmaking and other forms of making including photography and textiles as a way to instigate discussion around current social and political concerns. Her artworks regularly combine the bold graphic language of printed forms of public address with more intimate visual imagery including photographs of her friends at work, and objects that surround her. She creates context-specific installations that often foreground exhibition spaces as places for collaborative thinking and working, and in recent years her art practice has become synonymous with her ongoing artwork, Workshop (2010 - ongoing). Through Workshop, Phillips transforms galleries into spaces of simultaneous production and display which she invites others - artists, designers, community groups, children - to collaborate with her in making new artworks.
For Glasgow International 2018 Glasgow Print Studio presented the exhibition Show Me Your Glow by Phillips, featuring a body of work incorporating woodcut, relief printing and etching with the support of Glasgow Print Studio’s Master Printmakers, Scott Campbell and Ian McNicol.
She has worked as a lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Cumbria and in painting and printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art. Phillips has exhibited widely in public galleries and museums in the UK and internationally. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014, and in 2020 she was awarded the Queen Sonja Print Award in Oslo.
