shannon gerard
My visual art practice operates across several platforms and media. I write, draw and publish in a variety of forms including on-line comics, periodical illustrations, trade-paperback graphic fiction, and self-published artist’s books and multiples. Thematically I am very curious about issues such as magic, hope, faith and human frailty. I also produce large-scale installations that incorporate stop-motion animations and digital print, and spend at least 50% of my waking life crocheting soft sculptures.
A lot of my work employs play as a research strategy. Areas of interest include the mindset of the collector, the sculptural and performative possibilities suggested by books and book-objects, the conceptual space that books occupy beyond the presentation of texts and images, and how the social position of works (in other words, where we tend to encounter particular modes of art) mediates how we become engaged as readers/viewers.
I am also really getting into marionettes.
I love to work with small gallery shops and retailers! If you are interested in carrying my crochet work or books, please contact me via email (shannon AT shannongerard DOT org, or click the envelope icon below) for wholesale prices and policies.
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- UNSPENT LOVE
- BLOOD & THUNDER
- plants you can't kill
- BOOBS & DINKS
- PLAYING DOCTOR
- PLUSHTACHE
- anatomical hearts
- crocheted coral reef
- SWORD of MY MOUTH
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11 posts tagged unspent love
Thanks to Rachel Anne Farquharson for this great review of PINK PEARL at Art Barrage!
This brief animation was part of the exhibition PINK PEARL at the Gladstone Hotel in December 2011.
Print media is often characterized by a material emphasis on subtraction and addition. As a dug hole is mirrored by the mound of dirt it unearths, any removal of material from the surface of a print matrix implies an accumulation elsewhere. What meaning can be found in those liminal spaces between minus and plus? Works in PINK PEARL move past surface engagements with etched plates, burned screens, grained stones, carved wood and cut paper to explore the concepts of erasure and transcendence. Using print as a primary strategy, artists in PINK PEARL create 2-dimensional works on paper, artist books, material arts, sculpture, and animation.
Today is the first day I feel like I am getting the hang of strumming. It must be the good feeling still lingering from last week’s Book Launch. I put pictures up over at yonder Unspent Love.
New animation at YYZ, just in time for the UNSPENT LOVE book launch!
Thanks to everyone who came out to YYZ. I had a capital evening. So many of the people I love most in this world all gathered in the same room. Some of you met each other for the first time! One of my very best friends from high school, whom I haven’t seen in about 15 years, was there! And I was introduced to quite a few new folks including one bonafide Jedi. Not too shabby.
Guess what!? I have a book coming out with Conundrum Press this October! A trade paperback version of UNSPENT LOVE that includes a new chapter, a new cover, and a new life as a super affordable little package of stories. Need some nudging in the old heart? UNSPENT LOVE will tap you on the shoulder, whisper in your ear, maybe even kiss you in that darling warm spot on your neck, and curl up under your pillow. Yep, it’s that kind of tender little thing. Details about the book launch SOON.
It has been so super working with Andy at Conundrum too. Look at the bio page he made this very afternoon.
Well, I’m not a stud, but I was so happy to take part in this interview last year on Robin McConnell’s Vancouver-based radio program INKSTUDS. I’m moving into high gear now planning my second trip to the Left Edge to continue the research described at the end of this conversation. If you stick with this podcast past the sleepy beginning, you might like to hear us blab about Detroit, Sword of My Mouth, Unspent Love, autobiography, hyperbolic math nerding, and Blood and Thunder.
Click the green heading above to listen to our podcast.
The songs sprinkled in to the conversation relate in some circuitous ways to the content of the interview. The most interesting one is probably Making Believe by Ella Fitzgerald and The Ink Spots (ink spots, ink studs, samesamebutdifferent) because that was the only 45 my grandmother had to play in 1944 when my father was an infant. I like to think of it as the repeating soundtrack to her isolation as a young mum— one song to tell her story and drive her crazy.
Many thanks to Vanessa Nicholas for such a nice mention in her piece about TCAF for Canadian Art.
In 2010, I received the incredible opportunity to develop Unspent Love as a multi-media bookwork through Open Studio’s Nick Novak Fellowship. The first 17 chapters were produced in this hand-bound volume that incorporates digital printing, screen, letterpress and buttonhole binding.
I normally sell this edition for $100, but this weekend at TCAF, I have it on special for $45
