The next Artist You Need To Know is Shary Boyle.
Boyle is a contemporary Canadian visual artist (based in Toronto) who is primarily known for her work in ceramic sculptures but also has produced important artworks in drawing, painting and performance, sometimes in collaboration with other artists.
From her site : “Shary Boyle’s multidisciplinary work considers the social history of ceramic figures, animist mythologies, antiquated technologies and folk-art forms to create a symbolic, feminist and politically charged language uniquely her own. Her practice is activated through collaboration and mentorship, engaging other creative communities and makers with a characteristically inclusive spirit.”
Born in Scarborough, Ontario, in 1972, Boyle was a student at the Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts and then the Ontario College of Art, graduating in 1994. She was part of the Toronto music scene – specifically the punk and hardcore genres – as a singer. Her early works included posters, T-shirt designs and a number of ‘zines that were often photocopied and distributed for free in the music and art community. For almost a decade, Boyle worked as an illustrator in tandem with her art practice of drawing and painting.
A major shift in her practice happened in 1998 : Boyle began to work with a synthetic polymer clay called Sculpey : she studied with Vivian Hausle (a doll maker located in Seattle, in 2002) to expand her sculptural techniques to working with porcelain, as well.
From an interview with Sculpture Magazine : “As a young artist, I was focused on subversion, creating my identity and sexuality, exploring the internal, and working through my family of origin. I had a lot of patriarchal and misogynistic socialized self-harm from when I was a child. There was value in examining family conditioning, a training in resistance. I was driven to question and destabilize what I was being taught to think of as “reality” (what I should expect and limit myself to) through a fantastic realm of female sexuality, and the female body. I was trying for a kind of radical honesty by refusing shame. It was my personal story, as a young white woman from a working-class, male-dominated place, and it wasn’t until I got a little older that the larger world started knocking, insisting that there were other things going on than my issues. It’s a process of maturation and evolution. The concerns of the art world do not always create the environment or honesty required to look clearly at oneself, or the greater world. We need time and space to learn, outside institutions.”
From the text for the exhibition Outside the Palace of Me : “Boyle mines histories of craft and obsolete technologies to connect our current realities to legacies of the past. Revolving the stage on her uncanny characters and their destabilized audience, she urges viewers to think critically about how we create both ourselves and the world we inhabit.”
From Canadian Art Magazine : “Shary Boyle’s practice impressively integrates multiple elements: the personal and the political; the emotional and the intellectual; the expansive and the focused; and the abject and the mainstream.”
Important and impressive career highlights for Boyle include her representing Canada at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013; being featured at the 2017 Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in South Korea; a commissioned video work for the 2021 Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania; being awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award ; the Gershon Iskowitz Prize ; and an honourary Doctorate of Fine Arts from OCAD University. A page devoted to her most significant exhibitions can be enjoyed here.
Boyle’s artworks can be found in many collections, both public and private. These include the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, ON), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
More of Boyle’s work can be seen here at her site. A more detailed listing of her exhibitions, performances and other work – such as film works and collaborations – can be seen here.