About:
Shary Boyle (b. 1972) is from the Scarborough area of Toronto. The recipient of a 2021 Honourary Doctorate of Fine Arts from her alma mater, Boyle graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1994, developing a studio practice centered on figurative drawing, painting, and live performance. Creating deeply imaginative, idiosyncratic, and unsettling worlds, Boyle was an early innovator of live-drawing techniques using overhead projectors referencing shadow puppetry and cell animation. Boyle often collaborated with musicians and artists of other disciplines for these performances, activating her practice with a characteristically inclusive spirit.
Boyle began making sculpture in the late 1990s, modelling small polymer clay figures. Seemingly naïve and otherworldly, these flesh-like works incorporated fantastical imagery and often had an explicitly sexual aspect. She began working with ceramics in 2002, following a workshop on cast porcelain figurines and lace draping, approaches typically associated with elderly hobbyists. Boyle began researching the European history of the porcelain figurine, critically appraising its Enlightenment roots. The resulting works, exhibited at Toronto’s The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in 2006, balanced highly refined and seductive surfaces with startling, sometimes disturbing imagery: a noblewoman holding her own bloody head in her hands, a lady consumed by delicate blossoms, a reclining damsel with an arching ouroboros of heads terminating between her legs.
Shary Boyle continues to work in sculpture, installation, drawing, and performance.
Bio curtesy of Mackenzie Art Gallery
“I feel the need to create an alternate world, a vision of what might be magical or beautiful or fantastic about being human”
"I’ve always worked with unconventional, non-institutional materials and learning methods, and I am medium fluid. I’ve sought mentorship from tradespeople and hobbyists, made work and performed in and for communities with zero “cultural currency.” My forms are chosen by the ideas I’m immersed in at that moment. But there was always an art-world resistance to anything crafted or intimate—like textiles or natural materials, the handmade, decorative, small-scale, or domestic. The feminine. The sacred. Of the earth. For years, I felt sidelined by gate-keeping resistance. My approaches were patronized as a folk thing, not sophisticated or worthy of the art world; all of these restrictions were ways of shutting artists down into replicating a male, Eurocentric, classist cannon of approved materiality."
"Everything I make is by hand, and because I’m a figurative artist, there are mistakes, like, I’m human, I’m not a master. But I’m also not… there’s another camp, or school of art, that’s about intentional rawness, intentional, almost amateur kind of… or false amateur, where you’re making something that looks really shitty on purpose and it’s ironic."
“[Art-making] is how I process life and ideas and philosophy. I work it out through my practice, which is a lot of solitude and reflection and trying to get more and more in touch with myself. That’s actually really useful in terms of building confidence as I get older and become more myself.”
About our Artist Features
Our artist features series is a continuation of our past Instagram story series. Meant as a brief introduction to an artist, we aim for these post to be a reprieve to your scrolling, a stimulus for creativity and dialogue, and a fun way to share images and ideas that are inspiring us.