Largest Beadwork Sculptures in the World

The exhibition for Shelter II ends on Saturday, December 9 at U.W. Art Gallery

WATERLOO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / December 6, 2023 / Closing Reception (last date for public viewing) for Shelter II the largest beadwork sculpture in the world, hand-woven by Waterloo-based artist Sharl G. Smith will take place at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery (UWAG) on December 9th, 3-5 pm. Shelter II is currently on display at UWAG alongside Material Culture by Jose Luis Torres, and is available for public viewing from Wednesday to Saturday from 12-5 pm until December 9. Smith is also exhibiting new work as part of a two-person exhibition with nationally recognized Anishinaabeg artist Barry Ace titled "Beyond the Bead" at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery (CCGG) until January 7th. This exhibition is the first in the institution's 30-year history exclusively on beadwork. CCGG is currently running a fundraising campaign to purchase Embrace II currently installed outside the gallery.

From Ivan Jurakic, Curator of UWAG: "Shelter II is a large-scale beaded sculpture that ambitiously expands on the artist's beadwork practice. Applying weaving techniques employed in glass bead-stitching on a completely different scale, over the last two years Smith has radically up-scaled her process to incorporate hundreds of grapefruit-sized metal beads tensioned together using steel cable. The end result is a gargantuan beadwork that has immense physical presence and a surface that slyly reflects and distorts its surroundings. While building on the artist's training in architecture, Shelter II is also a pointed rebuke to the dismissal of beading as 'women's work' within the context of a patriarchal Western art history rather than as a viable and transgressive art form in its own right."

Shelter II is made of mirror-polished stainless steel spheres as 'beads' and stainless steel wire rope as 'thread'. It weighs over 2000 lbs and measures approximately 10ft H x 9ft W x 10ft L. Smith's works installed inside and outside of CCGG, also include custom-fabricated steel spheres as well as brass and blown glass ‘beads'. All of Sharl G. Smith's sculptures currently on display at UWAG and CCGG were made possible by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Waterloo Region Arts Fund and the Ontario Arts Council.

About Sharl G. Smith:
Smith is a Jamaican-born Canadian sculptor specializing in bead-stitching as a means of exploring her identity, gender equity and care-based value systems. Her artistic practice is centred around reimagining ancient beadweaving techniques into an innovative and contemporary form of art-making. Through the intricate process of beadwork-meticulously stitching discrete units together to form a cohesive whole-Smith explores potent themes of the invisible systems of care. Sharl G. Smith was born and raised in Jamaica and is based in Waterloo. She obtained her Bachelor of Architecture in 2003 and spent over a decade working as a designer and architectural professional in the United States. Moving to Canada in 2015, she became a full-time artist and proprietor of Sun Drops Studio.

SHELTER II at UWAG

SHELTER III (and more) at CCGG

SOURCE: Sun Drops Studio