Sheila Ross is an English installation artist and photographer who has recently returned to the UK after living and working in New York City for 40 years. Trained as a sculptor at St. Martin's School of Art in London, she recently contributed to and was on the editorial board for The Locked Room: Four Years that Shook Art Education (MIT Press, 2020), a book examining the educational experiment that took place at St Martin’s in her first year in sculpture school.
Since that original training, Ross has shifted from the physicality of substantial materials to work with light and space, first in environmental installations, and now in photography and video.
Sculpture seemed to exclude the viewer by its relentless physicality. Environmental installations turn that inside out — we literally enter the work and inhabit the same space that the work does in a way similar to that in which we inhabit the world. Working with light alone takes this one stage further: all images are projections, parallel to the way that we live in a world created by the projections of our minds.
The continuing direction of the work is the attempt to create something that expresses what it feels like to be alive, to be human: a condition that has mystified the best of us for centuries. Increasingly, Ross’s art practice is influenced by her Zen practice, which works to strip away the habits of conceptualization and bring us directly to our own experience of being alive.
