Canadian born, Sheila Vollmer is London based after post graduate studies in Sculpture at St. Martin's School of Art, London 1987 and a BA Honors Art, University of Guelph, Canada. Her practice is based at www.aptstudios.org Deptford where she was a founding member and she is Sculpture Program Manager and Tutor at Morley College Waterloo London.

Vollmer has exhibited widely in Britain and featured in group exhibits in Ireland, Holland, Taiwan, Germany, Canada and USA. Solo exhibitions & commissions include: ‘Sine Line’, Public Sculpture Commission, Integral Powertrain Ltd., Milton Keynes, 2020; APT Portal Project solo gallery window exhibit, APT Gallery SE8 2021; Artist of the Day (solo show), Flowers Gallery Central, London SE1 2015; The Atrium Gallery, Cooper’s & Lybrand, London WC1

Recent and noteworthy group and 2-person exhibitions include:

• Thames-Side Studios Gallery: A Push or a Pull, curated by Alexandra Baraitser (2024)
• Reveal, Morley College Printmaking & Sculpture Staff exhibition, Morley Gallery, London SE1 (2024)
• Talking Sculpture: Dialects of Making, TSM (G Brent, A Harley & S Vollmer) @ Vessel Gallery, York St John University, Exhibition and Symposium with Yorkshire based artists, C Cullen, K Cowling and H Honeywill, (Symposium guest speaker G Pollock) York YO31 (2023-24)
• TSM presents ‘Still Here –Women Making Abstract Sculpture’ exhibition & discussion, with guests A Reading & B Galletley, APT Gallery, Deptford (2023)
  
• 'Colour 2023' Burghley Sculpture Garden, Burghley House, Stamford, Lincs. (2023)
• 'Catch your Breath' London Group and Friends Sculpture Exhibition, St John’s Churchyard, Waterloo London SE1 (July 2022)
• VJB Arts presents 'Sheila Vollmer and Lindsay Mapes', - 2-person exhibit, 10 Gresham Street, London EC2, Sept 2020-21
• Royal Society of Sculptors (RSS) Summer Exhibition ‘Gonna Get Craycray’ selected by Sigrid Kirk, Dora House, RSS, London SW7, July-Sept 2021
• Chelsea Flower Show 2018 - VTB Garden - Stuart Towner, 2 sculptures commissioned.
• Royal Academy Summer exhibition 2018, selected by Grayson Parry,
  RA London.
• Cass Sculpture Fdn, Maquette exhibition, Goodwood, West Sussex, 2016-17.
• International Exhibition of Wood Sculpture, Wood Sculpture Museum Taiwan 2012.
• London Bridge City Sculpture (2 sculptures on riverside walkway by Hay’s Galleria London) 2011-12.
• 'Thinking Big: 21st Cent. British Sculpture', Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, 2003.
  
  

Artistic Concerns
Sheila Vollmer explores sculpture and sculpture installations constructing in various materials including wood, steel, tinted Perspex, rope and sometimes castings responding directly to the material and space.

Inspiration comes from various sources within experiences of architecture, natural systems like the patterns of energy or growth, and our physical human relationship to these.

Colour is not an afterthought. The colour choices are often vivid in her mind as she make the work. Added and found colour and surface accentuate the inside/outside of the lines, forms and negative spaces, which in turn add to the rhythm, viewpoints, mood and energy of the work.

Working within both a systematic and spontaneous process Sheila constructs her sculpture in a modular rhythm of replicated and changing units of shape, line and found object both opening and containing space, searching to express the inside/outside pull of energy and emotion to achieve an organic wholeness.

The use of steel angle grew out of earlier sculpture constructions with found windows and doors. Where the angle/frame would have held glass and framed a view, it now holds space or a channel of colour suggesting different viewpoints, mood and energy. The recent explorations with tinted Perspex add more edges, colour and form around the works with the suggested glazing pushing beyond the boundaries of the steel angle.

The skirting board works, both the singular forms and the installations to interior spaces, also explore this modular construction and again aim for an inside/outside rhythm, poetry and humor. Like Sheila’s previous work with found windows and doors, she finds herself as interested in the linear elements and negative spaces of constructing with skirting boards, as she is in their poetic symbolism and relationship to architectural space.

The installations in rope and constructed Dexion steel cube connect and inhabit specific spaces, playing with suspended line, geometry and light balancing order/chaos and inside/out.

Sheila’s work ranges in scale from hand-held sized sculptures to room sized installations and outdoor works: for example the recent 2020 Public Sculpture commission ‘Sine Line’ for www.ehelix.com making electric drive systems, Milton Keynes UK. Celebrating the innovative copper wire manufacturing process, ‘Sine Line’ was created to explore the rhythm of line, negative space and the resulting oscillating form: line creating energy.

The structure of Sheila’s sculptural work, the nature of the material, the methods of making and gravity are interdependent with an aim to respect but push the material and search for that ‘otherness’ responding to space.