About
Sonia Shiel’s paintings explore our relationship to the natural world, one another, and ourselves - in surreal and subjective narratives, set as close to survival as they are to extinction. Inhabiting the edges of both, Shiel’s shape-shifting scenes describe environmental, ontological, art historical, and personal chaos. Sheets of painted canvas are tailored into free-standing traversable shape, with confronting botanical, seismic, and creaturely characteristics. As pageant, polyptych, terrain, glove, or portal, Shiel’s hyper-objects bear sentient qualities, generate performative elements, and often create opportunities for engagement by conspiring with the body as a site of encounter.
