Sheila Vollmer
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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

Upcoming, recent and noteworthy group and 2-person exhibitions include:

  • Thames-Side Studios Gallery: A Push or a Pull, curated by Alexandra Baraitser (2024)
  • This Stuff Matters presents ‘Still Here –Women Making Abstract Sculpture’ exhibition & discussion, chaired by curator Meghan Goodeve, APT Gallery, Deptford SE8 (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)
  • 'Collaborations' Group exhibit of paintings, prints and exterior sculpture at Goodnestone Park curated by Linden Hall Studio Gallery, Kent CT3 (Aug –Sept 2022)
  • 'This stuff Matters' (4 women sculptors), Pop up exhibition/discussion with Meghan Goodeve, Yorkshire Arts Space, Sheffield S1 Oct 2021
  • 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
  • BRITAIN 21 'Coming up for Air’,London Group’ organized Sculpture Exhibition part of Waterloo Festival ’21, St John’s Churchyard, London SE1 June 2021
  • 'Feeling for Murmuration', curated by Jillian Knipe and the exhibiting artists, Art House1 gallery, postponed and moved to APT Gallery 2020
  • 'This stuff matters, 4 women sculptors',
    https://www.stuff-matters.co.uk/
    (Alex Harley, Gillian Brent, Jill Gibson & Sheila Vollmer) exhibit/recorded discussion, Unit 3, ASCs Studios, London 2020 + Morley Radio Podcast, (Women making Sculpture) 2021 https://morleyradio.co.uk/programmes/the-sculpture-podcast-ep4/
  • 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.

Playing with line, form, space, rhythm and colour, Sheila Vollmer makes abstract sculpture and sculpture installations. Constructing in various materials including wood, steel, Perspex, rope and sometimes castings, she works within both a systematic and spontaneous process of responding directly to materials and making; opening and containing space, searching to express the inside/outside pull of energy and emotion to achieve an organic wholeness.

Sheila’s work ranges in scale from small hand held sized sculptures to room size installations and large 3m high outdoor works. Regardless of size and format what interests her is how the work touches the surfaces it rests on and responds to its surrounding space.

Colour is not an afterthought. Vollmer claims that the colour choice is often vivid in her mind as she makes 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.

Inspiration comes from various sources within experiences of architecture, natural ecology systems like the patterns of energy or growth, and the body’s relationship to these. Sheila is interested in how our visual and emotional or poetic selves are triggered by such elements as form, size, colour and rhythm within a sculptural form or installation; in search of that ‘otherness’ - a balance of order, chaos, mood and meaning.

   
  Sheila Vollmer
APT Studios
6 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 3EW
Tel: +44 020 8244 6873
sheilavollmer@gmail.com

Download CV >>

 
 
Other web sites featuring her work are:

https://www.aptstudios.org/sheila-vollmer
https://sculptors.org.uk/artists/sheila-vollmer

      Text ©Sheila Vollmer 2023
  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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