Shelby Charlesworthhelby recently completed an artist residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. There she worked on a number of pieces, some of which will be shown at Harm’s Reach. The lost wax bronze worms with patina on hand-built ceramic support.
Shelby writes, “My interests lie in the slippage between absence and presence; the ephemeral and fixed. I use porcelain, embroidery, printmaking, textiles, and found objects to create compositions that relate to the temporality and permanence of the body. Tracing spaces once touched, seeking comfort in an absent hand, I ground my work in personal experiences and a larger social context to investigate themes of loss, longing, grief and collective trauma.
Recent explorations have examined the systemic impact of capitalism creating personal feelings of failure, as well as how perception of failure societally relates to experiences of gender and queer identity. Through mass-production of small, familiar items like buttons, pencils, and handkerchiefs, I repeatedly and laboriously create amassments of delicate objects – emphasizing themes of labour and collective fragilities. These, alongside quilts and other labour-intensive handmade objects, form a large interdisciplinary body of work that underlie the necessity for empathy to understand our weighted world. Cracked flesh, an aching back, still, I must persist.”
