Oil & Water Don't Mix
Ciara Phillips
5.6.–30.8.2026

Ciara Phillips is a Canadian/Irish artist based in Bergen, Norway, since 2022. Phillips' process-lead approach to working with print, has gained her international recognition for both her individual and collaborative work in the field of contemporary art. She has worked as an educator and as an artist in community contexts since the late 1990s, and her long-term artwork, Workshop (2010 - ) - which engages people of all ages and backgrounds in thinking-through-making with her - has been exhibited widely in public institutions. In recent years, exhibitions of her work have taken place at: Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Haugesund billedgalleri; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; TATE Britain, London; Benaki Museum, Athens; Kunsthall Stavanger and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia as part of the Sydney Biennale in 2018. She is currently Professor in Fine Art at The Art Academy: Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Bergen.

 

'Oil & Water Don't Mix', a fundamental principle upon which forms of printmaking are based, was first used by Phillips in the context of the September 2019 climate strikes. On 20 September 2019, Phillips, then resident at Kunsthall Stavanger hosted a public screen-printing session to mark a day of Global Strike that preceded the United National Climate Summit in New York. Since then, it has become a recurring slogan in her work.  Most recently, it has been exhibited alongside 'No to War! No More!' at an exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts in Ireland. Here, the text is presented as a flag outside of Kunsthall 3,14 facing Bergen's harbour.