Artist Statement

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I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Boston. Through my artistic endeavors, which include sculptural ceramics, installations, and public art, I invent three-dimensional worlds that explore memory and the challenges posed by its fragile nature. I believe that the past is caught between three discrete elements: its reality, our idealization of that reality, and the impossibility of recapturing that reality. By investigating these intersections I reclaim fragments of memory, defying the notion that reclaiming memories is beyond our grasp.

Sculpture animates a site and invites connection and participation. Researching a location allows me to envision how I can transform a site into an intentional place. Conceptually my sculptures, site specific works, and public art interventions are catalysts for social change.

A consistent theme of my sculpture and installation work has been the enthusiastic adoption of atavistic art — art that references, reinterprets, and reimagines ancient and ancestral forms.  I have created series that include shields, labyrinths, vessels, scroll jars, and totems.  These are primal reflections of universal human experiences across cultures that have been expressed since the beginning of recorded time.  

My drive as a public artist is to revisit and reframe these forms and make them relevant to contemporary individuals and communities.  I also employ these ancestral themes in a fashion that makes them newly participatory, bringing people together and inviting them to share their memories of the past, thoughts of the present, and hopes for the future.  I see these works as being what I call “memory-keepers.”  

I am drawn to these archetypes because they are reminders of my and our belonging — belonging to the past, present, and future.  They are unifying in that they express our collective human conscience and the unconscious. 

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TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

As a teaching artist, Shirah believes in the transformative power of the arts. With her energetic approach to teaching, she aims to empower each one of her students by teaching them how to use techniques and art materials such as hand-building and sculpting in clay; creating mosaics; and watercolor painting to name a few. Shirah encourages her students to develop and expand their visual vocabulary as she also supports them to express themselves fully and freely. Shirah’s positive and encouraging personality extends naturally to her teaching philosophy. She promotes multidisciplinary experimentation with art processes and visual observation.

Core to her teaching is igniting the flow of creative thinking. Shirah is committed to incorporating both contemporary visual culture and art history into her instruction. She employs the use of self-reflection to help students analyze their work and encourages documentation of the students’ processes including “gallery openings” for finished works.  

Originally having trained in studio art (ceramics) and psychology, Shirah creates ceramics and sculptures inspired by emotion, expression, and abstraction. Shirah gathers participants and through the creative process she delights in guiding art projects larger in aim, scope, and scale than what participants could achieve individually.

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ART EXHIBITIONS