About
Sheila Ross is an English installation artist and photographer who recently returned to the UK after living and working in New York City for nearly 40 years. Trained at the sculpture school of St. Martin’s School of Art in London, she earned an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York.
Ross shifted from the physicality of the substantial materials of sculpture to working with light and space, initially creating environmental installations out of light, projections and sound and subsequently working with photography and video.
The continuing direction of the work is the attempt to create something that expresses what it feels like to be alive, to be human, in all its difficulty and uncertainty. Increasingly Ross’s art practice is influenced by her Zen practice, which works to strip away the habits of conceptualisation and bring us directly to our own lived experience.
On her return to the UK in 2016, Ross joined the editorial board of a book, The Locked Room, Four Years That Shook Art Education, 1969-73, which describes a radical experiment that took place in the sculpture school at St. Martin’s during her first year there in 1970. Students were locked in a studio during working hours with only the materials placed there for them, restricted access to tools, no verbal communication, no feedback, no documentation, no reading, writing or drawing, and their work was removed and destroyed at undisclosed intervals with no notice, to be replaced with new materials the next day. This book of first-hand accounts by participants in the experiment will be published by MIT Press in April 2020, with launches and a symposium at Central Saint Martins and Laure Genillard Gallery, London.
Ross is represented by A.I.R Gallery in Brooklyn, and has had fellowships at MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Arts. She has taught in the visual arts programs of Hunter College and Fordham University in New York City; she was also senior designer for Fordham’s Office of Marketing Communications for 15 years.
Since joining A.I.R in 2005, she has had three solo exhibitions there: NightVision (video and photographs); {I am} just the birds in the grass… (infrared photographs); and ... so much space in the night ... (photographs). Of her several group shows with the gallery, two travelled to Sweden and Hungary. In 2009 photographs from her NightVision series were selected by Barbara O’Brien for “Third Person Singular: Does Gender Still Matter?” at the Art Institute of Boston. In 2008-9 the group show “Your Documents Please” toured Japan, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia and Mexico before going to New York City. Prior to her A.I.R. membership, she was selected by Shamim Momin for the 2003 A.I.R. Biennial.
In 2014 her photographs were shown at the Nott Memorial Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, in “On Being,” a three-person show curated by Julie Lohnes, with panel discussion on art, meditation and dreamwork. In 2017, she was a guest artist in Ann Pachner's "The Blossom as the Self," at A.I.R.
The environmental installations (1987-2001) were created largely with light, whether computerized theatre lights or projected film, video or slides. They have been shown at The Rotunda Gallery, Experimental Intermedia, BACA Downtown, and Janalyn Hansen White Gallery, Iowa. She created a stage set Marjory Gamso’s dance piece Her 1001 Nights at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre.