Grace Shiels

My work and research have been influenced by many aesthetics. I attempt to link the past and future, life and death, with human touch and discarded objects by creating my mythology in the form of visual language of aesthetics, motifs, objects and actions. Medieval landscapes of sickness and god, the pseudo-sciences of 19th-century medical development, are key examples of aesthetics I've adapted. These moments explore the human body viscerally through raw imagery. The body is being explored as an external mass of flesh and bone.

I use clay as a metaphor for the physical ground we walk on, our planet, Earth—a metaphor for time and change, a metaphor for birth and body and belief and creation. Through clay, I attempt to embody a transient experience of living beneath a body of blood and bone.