Sue Howard Warren

Born in Bahrain, educated in the UK and now living in Canada, Sue Howard is a mixed media artist based in Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, where she works under the name Shamal Fine Art.
Her varied professional career, humanitarian work and international travels have shaped her interest in people (particularly women) who live on the margins of society. Her work gives voice to those who are in plain sight yet are socially silenced. Her projects have explored female survival of sexual and domestic abuse: forced labour in India’s brick kilns: the experiences of refugees and exiles, and the persecution and displacement of people groups. In her work her muses do not just ‘survive’ they ‘thrive’ and she openly dares anyone to suggest otherwise.
Howard builds her paintings in layers, allowing faces to emerge from abstraction and sometimes dissolve back into it. Softer surfaces and partially erased forms give vulnerability and persistence a place within the same image. Recurring visual structures in her work suggest borders, systems of control and fragmented archives. Textures accumulate like sediment, bearing witness to trauma, resilience and divine dignity as she explores social invisibility – not as emptiness – but as a site of latent powe...