Sally Thurlow is a multi-disciplinary artist living by the shores of Lake Ontario in a wildlife sanctuary. Informed by engaging with different cultures, their environments and beyond, through media, travel and discussion, her practice is based in sculpture, installation, photography and painting. It invites the examination of how cultural and environmental issues impact our communities. Rambles on public lands render collections and reflections; distinctive forms sharpening awareness about the current work. Sculptural forms are fabricated, material selections chosen from a variety of substances, symbolic within the meanings of the forms.
In her last Red Head Gallery exhibition, CROSSROADS, she challenged perceptions about our societies; what it means to be Canadian while shifts in power and privilege emerge with new understandings of our cultural histories, and mass immigration from around the world continues to expand our multiculturalism. Thurlow invited the public to write their comments on the driftwood poles via “bark” papers, thereby inviting further discussion.
CROSSROADS developed from her 2016 Red Head Gallery exhibition Systems Failure, (made while following the election proceedings for the latest US president). There, the forms grieved the breakdown of family, as well as larger groups: friends, corporations, political parties, to world organizations, in an ever-spiralling broken system. We were confronted with the visual force of four alienated characters represented by rib-cages, all fabricated from disparate materials, familiar yet uncomfortably strange... all with expectations of each other.
RECLAMATION was the result of an earlier, six week artist residency in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. It launched the production of a dynamic range of archetypal figures speaking through driftwood, and other ephemera. Earlier still, drawing on Thurlow’s own journey with canoes, CANOE DREAMINGS’ twelve sculpturally based canoes embodied its cultural history and ideas about its future. Group showings between solo exhibitions assist in determining the inquiry forward.
Her work has been shown internationally including ARC Gallery, Chicago, Ill, BluSeed Studios and Gallery, Saranac Lake, NY, and Kunsthaus Gallery, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Thurlow received a BA majoring in Fine Arts from the University of Toronto, finishing with Cultural and Environmental Studies at Trent University, with significant earlier studies at OCAD and George Brown College. She has been the recipient of various Ontario Arts Council Awards and has given numerous artist talks and workshops at educational institutions and public galleries. She is a member of The Iris Group and The Red Head Gallery, both artists’ collectives. Her work is held in private collections across Canada, and at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario.
www.redheadgallery.org | www.theirisgroup.ca | Curriculum Vitae