October 1 - November 9, 2024
H-E-B Gallery
Reception Saturday, October 12, 5-7pm
Textile Artist
Sadie Sheldon is an artist living and working in New Orleans, LA. Her work explores the excess of consumer society, playfully commodifying refuse within immersive installations. She is a member of the Aquarium Gallery Collective and is the recent recipient of the Art Prize Big Pitch. She has been an artist in residence at Basement6 in Shanghai, The Birdsell Project in South Bend, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon and Breck Create, and now Rockport, TX.
Sadie creates site and time-specific projects from found materials. Projects engage with ideas related to adaptability, renewal, and appreciating the objects of our everyday life. Projects result from various research and obsessions, as well as accidental discoveries made while trying things. She travels to feed her curiosity and to understand the abundance of perspectives in our world. These encounters with people and places regularly bring her into new relations with her surroundings and lead to new ideas that call previous norms into question. She says her “work reshapes the way we experience, and often take for granted, the stuff of our world–both its raw materials and ideas.”
She’s made work about consumer culture, mass disposability, dreamscapes, change blindness, the wild woman archetype, environmental degradation, parallel worlds, semantic satiation, vibrant matter, living nomadically, and a former life in the circus. The connective tissue often lies within the materials she uses and the layers of process she employs when constructing pieces. Almost all of the elements she uses are harvested from discarded piles of waste which she reimagines for greater purposes in storytelling.
Based in New Orleans with opportunities to travel and work as an artist-in-residence throughout the years. She’s spent time at The Vermont Studio Center, Basement6 in Shanghai, The Birdsell Project, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Kuona Trust in Nairobi, the Textile Art Center, Stove Works and the Tides Institute, she says “all of which have had a profound impact on my life and work.” I have a deep gratitude to all of the communities that continue to support and engage with my work and look forward to sharing more.”