SHEILA METCALF TOBIN
Location:
Berkeley, CA, USA
ARTIST BIO
Sheila Metcalf Tobin is an artist who has spent her life in search of connection. As an only child and only grandchild she spent a lot of time exploring alone outside. At the age of 5, she stood in her great grandmother’s garden watching a Monarch butterfly gracefully flutter among the Phlox and Lantana flowers. The moment was filled with wonder and yearning, flooded with an awareness of feeling related to, in kinship with this creature so utterly different from herself. It was a knowing, she was discouraged to trust but it has remained a core experience that she draws upon heavily to navigate her life and work.
Sheila holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago but long before her formal education began she fell in love with the practice of drawing. The focus and attention required in observation based drawing cultivates connection between the drawer and the subject and opens the possibility of knowing akin to tenderly holding and touching, fostering both love and empathy. All of Sheila’s work begins with drawing as a process to explore and capture an encounter like the one in her great grandmother's garden. Her drawings expand into compositions on paper, wood panels sewn fabrications and walls with the use of a variety of media, collage, fabric and installations that attempt to convey a deep love of the world and the beautiful complexity of the kinship we share with our wild counterparts. Sheila’s work has been exhibited nationally, internationally and locally in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area and is included in many private collections.
ARTIST STATEMENT
It is through the processes of observing and drawing that I have most keenly felt the sensations of kinship and belonging. My inspiration derives from the events in my early childhood when I followed the impulse to investigate and immerse myself in the wilderness on the edges of our housing development. This early exploration still resonates deeply and my subjects continue to be drawn from personal experiences with people, plants and animals. My practice is rooted in walking and observing, seeking guidance from the land and its inhabitants. My studio is a space to process personal ideas and translate profound encounters into physical form.
In the early years of my practice, I experimented with drawing directly on walls and floors, pushing my imagery beyond traditional boundaries of canvas and frame to suggest that our experiences are not finite but persist and permeate the world around us. This approach has evolved to allow for more expansive representations of interconnectedness resulting in multilayered wall collages, stitched fabric structures and installations. Within all these compositions, I recreate and invent interactions that illustrate our interdependence upon other creatures. At times I directly represent existing mutualistic relationships between species, while at other times I imagine and invent manifestations of characteristics or abilities of the beings that surround us.
Today, my work is a culmination of years spent pursuing drawing as a way to understand and integrate intimate life events and rites of passage. Every work begins with a personal encounter that leads to an observation-based drawing of another form of life. These drawings have accumulated into a library of living organisms that are the foundation for compositions that celebrate the unique beauty and complexity of our shared world, forming compositions that capture interactions with wildness to invite reflection and contemplation of the intersections of our lives.
