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	Canadian born, Sheila Vollmer has made London her home since 1987 after a post graduate in Sculpture at St Martin's School of Art. In Canada she completed a BA in Visual Art at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, 1985. She has exhibited widely in Britain and undertaken some commissions nationally and internationally. She has also been featured in group exhibits in Eire, Canada and United States. Recent exhibitions have included: Spitalfields Public Art, Spitalfields Market, London, 2009-10; A Celebration of British Sculpture, group garden exhibit, Leicester University, 2009; Artists at Morley, Morley Gallery, London 2009; London Group Open Exhibition, Menier Gallery, London 2009; Geometry & Colour, group exhibit, Poussin Gallery, London 2008; 18@108, Sculptors on Sculpture, talk & group exhibit, Royal Society of British Sculptors, London 2008; Electric Blue, Barge House OXO Tower Wharf, London 2008; travelling exhibit Fe2 05 of 5 women sculptors working with steel in Darlington, APT Gallery, London and Canary Wharf 2005-2006, London; Royal West of England Open Sculpture, Bristol 2007. Awards have included The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, British Council Travel Grant, and an Ontario Arts Council Grant. Jobs supporting her art have included being painter Euan Uglow's model 1987-89, a technician for sculptor Anthony Caro 1990-91 and presently Head of Sculpture, Drawing & Painting at Morley College, London. Her work is featured in public and private collections, most recently The Prudential plc, Lonndon; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Staffs and Dillington House, Illminster, Somerset. Private collections of her work include Canada, Britain, US and Switzerland. Some of her work is also on ongoing display at several sculpture parks including Cass Foundation www.sculpture.org Other web sites featuring her work are: www.aptstudios.org   www.rbs.org.uk www.anderssonhall.com  www.axisweb.org/artist/sheilavollmer www.thesculpturepark.co.uk
				Sheila Vollmer APT Studios 6 Creekside Deptford London SE8 3EW Tel: +44 020 8244 6873 sheilavollmer@yahoo.co.uk Download CV >>
	Artist Statement My sculptural work is primarily abstract and geometric with references to the natural, spiritual and constructed world. The materials and processes that I work with are various from cast cement to rope installations, although steel, in particular, angle iron, has preoccupied me over many years.   Starting points and influences for my work have been architectural spaces & materials, symbols (geometric and sacred), natural systems or energy – (patterns created by growth or the elements; sand, wind, waves and the energy or systems passing through our bodies), human proportions/presence, manmade systems of machinery/energy – a shared experience of humanity. The aim of my work is that ‘they’ the sculptures or installations are first and foremost visually, physically and emotionally exciting, enticing the eye and relating to the body. The form of the work and the nature of the material are interdependent. What interests me is how a work achieves a necessity of form through the working process by replicating and improvising on basic units of form with the addition of colour, surface and gravity, (how the work touches the surface(s) it rests on). A visual patterning and randomness is created by the system of the design and repeated form, shape and/or angle. The work is about the material and achieving wholeness, life and meaning within the forms in a systematic way.
			Text ©Sheila Vollmer 2010
	Reviews
	"It is her use of basic angle iron that marks Sheila Vollmer’s sculpture as being direct and open. She pushes the material to its limits through fundamental methodology, creating as wide a range of possibilities and solutions as she is able. .... the addition of colour either marks its construction, or alternatively acts as a renegade component. Her sculptures exhibit energy, movement, contradiction and fine balance." Excerpts from Steel - Sculpture in the Workplace at Canary Wharf curated & written by Ann Elliott, 2006 for Canary Wharf Group	"When we observe one of Vollmer’s sculptures two qualities emerge as paramount: geometric complexity within a deceptive simplicity and what may be described as “interiorness”. The geometry proceeds not from a preconceived idea but as a natural consequence of the aesthetic of the forms that constitute it. It is not the geometry of Euclid. If we attempt to follow a line it comes upon an impasse or is subverted by another line that itself teases the eye into a linear cull de sac. Consequently we cannot visually segment the work into its parts but are constrained to perceive it as a totality. Each sculpture in its different way encompasses a hollow at its centre. Its effect is to soften the hard edges of the material and to lead us into its heart. We sense that we can pass beyond the unyielding angles, verticals and horizontals into a space that is created by form but is not formalist." "Sheila Vollmer’s sculpture owes nothing to figuration or mimesis yet it invokes the natural world which surrounds us." Excerpts from Lionel Phillips: the Sculptures of Sheila Vollmer	"Canadian-born Sheila Vollmer’s work could be seen as lying in an interesting mid zone, somewhere between the environment-based spatial reveries of a Rachel Whiteread and the neo-modernism of early Tucker or Willard Boepple...colour is descriptive but generally clean...the scale is precise, there is a high degree of articulation within the whole, the concern is to create an experience that is sure and special. Vollmer is particularlyinterested in this process of development, how a sculpture achieves a necessity of form by replicating and improvising on basic units of form, the non-contradiction of achieving an organic wholeness in a systematic way. The great achievement of her work is the frequency with which she achieves that sense of completeness and right-ness whilst also giving the feeling that the form has been caught at a point of arrest;..." Excerpts from A Various Art by John Cornall – for the exhibition Influx by forms in flux 1997
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