NightVision: Mouthing , 2007, Archival pigment print, 24 x 16 inches
SHEILA ROSS
Artist Statement
Sheila Ross is an English installation artist and photographer who recently returned to the UK after living and working in New York City for nearly 40 years. Trained at the sculpture school of St. Martin’s School of Art in London, she earned an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York.
Ross shifted from the physicality of the substantial materials of sculpture to working with light and space, initially creating environmental installations out of light, projections and sound and subsequently working with photography and video.
The continuing direction of the work is the attempt to create something that expresses what it feels like to be alive, to be human, in all its difficulty and uncertainty. Increasingly Ross’s art practice is influenced by her Zen practice, which works to strip away the habits of conceptualisation and bring us directly to our own lived experience.
On her return to the UK in 2016, Ross joined the editorial board of a book, The Locked Room, Four Years That Shook Art Education, 1969-73, which describes a radical experiment that took place in the sculpture school at St. Martin’s during her first year there in 1970. Students were locked in a studio during working hours with only the materials placed there for them, restricted access to tools, no verbal communication, no feedback, no documentation, no reading, writing or drawing, and their work was removed and destroyed at undisclosed intervals with no notice, to be replaced with new materials the next day. This book of first-hand accounts by participants in the experiment was published by MIT Press in April 2020, with launches and a symposium at Central Saint Martins and Laure Genillard Gallery, London.
Past Solo Exhibitions:
...so much space in the night..., 2013
{I am} just the birds in the grass..., 2010
NightVision, 2007
Life On Earth — is brief, 1999
Past Group Exhibitions:
The Blossom As The Self, 2017
40/40: 40th Anniversary Exhibition, 2013
But that’s a different story..., 2011
The History Show: Work by A.I.R Artists from 1972 to the Present A.I.R Gallery with the Fales Collection, 2008
One True Thing: A.I.R in Putney, 2007
Generations.04, 2004
Biennial Exhibition of Women’s Art, 2003
Generation II, 2000