The Mineral Treasure of the Earth Print

Shannon Pawliw (b. 1970, Saskatoon, Canada) works in painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation. Her work is colourful, immersive, and bold to the point of being cartoonish. Both the painted and 3D work is rooted in organic forms and gesture. Pawliw works in exploratory series that are undertaken with the explicit intent of creating fantasy-based objects built around ideas, practices, and concepts that fascinate her. These ideas and concepts are as diverse as nostalgia, memory, family, loss, and microbes. They tend to involve an immersive (and often obsessive) years-long study of the subject. But ultimately, her work is firmly rooted in optimism and naïveté.