Shirley Wiebe

Topographies of Care

October 2020 - September 2021

Location

Vancouver, Victoria, and Edmonton

Shirley Wiebe is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver BC. Her installation and sculptural work explores relationships between physical geography and the built environment.

Shirley’s projects develop through investigation of materials, history and place. Substances are teased apart and re-imagined: corrugated plastic, mesh screening, industrial fragments and discarded objects undergo permutations that both utilize and deviate from their intended purpose. Hundreds of hand engraved wooden medallions woven into a massive ‘cozy’ to cover a severed tree trunk; a collection of interlinked piano keys whose form adapts uniquely to site; a series of stuffed amorphous shapes made from landscape cloth that suggest anthropomorphic resignation as they slowly biodegrade in the abandoned bear pit at Stanley Park Zoo.

Artist statement

hcma asked me the following questions in looking to develop three distinct 2D works that will act as a daily reminder of their responsibilities to their communities and the larger world: What does hcma represent? What can unite and bring communities together? My residency seeks to explore the common threads that can unite offices and the communities they serve.

More on the artist

Shirley has created site-specific installations in public art galleries and sculpture parks throughout the Pacific Northwest and participated in various international art residencies. She has been invited to collaborate with communities, groups and organizations and she, in turn, invites them to improvise with her.

Her work with hcma is a special project to create a new mural in each of our offices that reflects our body of work, people, and processes.