Shannon Pawliw

Shannon Pawliw's artistic practice includes painting, sculpture and site-specific installation. The work is colourful, immersive and bold to the point of being cartoonish. Both the painted and 3D works are rooted in organic forms and gestures.

Pawliw tends to work in exploratory series that are undertaken with the explicit intent of creating fantasy-based objects built around ideas, practices, and concepts that fascinate her. These ideas and concepts are as diverse as time, memory, family, loss, and the microbial world. At its root, all of the work shares a tendency to observe, romanticize, and fantasize about different aspects of our shared humanity and experience.

They also tend to involve an immersive, years-long study of the subject. Though the work is often obsessive, ultimately it is firmly rooted in abstraction, optimism, nostalgia, and naïveté.