sheila forde
artist statement

As an artist, I want you to come closer. I want both the artist and the viewer to examine and learn more about ourselves and love. Applying various approaches to research, I create works in oil pastel and oil paintings which analyze and evoke themes of intimacy, desire, sexuality, and heartbreak. I wish to understand how love and sex are faring under patriarchy and our current cultural and social landscape, as well as to nod to or reflect on how love has been mythologized, idealized or represented in art history, with a focus on women as both subjects and objects of love and desire.

Having worked in oil pastel on paper for a few years, I have recently begun to paint with oil to continue to evolve within my art practice. My technique is as trancelike as it is methodical and innate, using eye, hand, and mind to bring to life drawings and paintings by hand an image which is thoroughly researched, painstakingly studied, emotionally internalized and intuitively expressed. The work which results is one which fuses my years of skill in rendering with both in-depth research on subjects of love, heartbreak, sexuality, and my personal obsessions with art history, superstition, use of symbol, and a devoted emphasis on colour theory. My process is an exhaustive and deep yearning for self-awareness and belonging, a search for recognition of my subjective experience as a woman reflected in paintings, photography, film, and classical and contemporary literature. Both confessional and provocative, as well as layered with metaphor and symbol, my work plays with and draws from my own personal history, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, pornography, poetry, literature, film, and art history. Important past subjects have included stills from the films, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Les Rendezvous d’Anna (1978), as well as studies of works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, Shakespeare, and Millais. A recent oil painting (in rushes fear, 2024) depicts the bloodied head of a wolf baring its teeth after attempting to devour its prey, a subject which was directly inspired by an excerpt on desire from the essay, the love of the wolf, by the contemporary French philosopher and writer, Hélene Cixous.

I believe my obsession with love, its trials and devices, is rooted in a universal drive toward understanding ourselves and others through vulnerability, empathy, fear, courage, and, ultimately, is a wish for a sense of recognition, belonging, and connection in a culture which seems increasingly isolating. I am currently working on some studies in oil on canvas inspired by works on the subject of ecstasy. Some recent oil paintings as well as personal ephemera from my studio walls are on view in the current two-person exhibition, Sheila Forde, Tuomas Korpijaakko at F in Houston, Texas, which runs from April 21 – June 8, 2024. This is the first significant exhibition of my work to date. You can find out more about me and my work through my instagram account, @aslowdancer.