Michelle Sirois Silver
CONTEMPORARY TEXTILE ART
Artist Statement
A friend once called me a seeker. She was right. The underpinning for my art practice is a perpetual quest. A quest to bring concept, materials, and techniques into alignment. My recent works lean towards irony and humour, and yet they draw attention in unexpected ways to the beauty and simplicity of everyday things.
I was born on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec and spent my formative years on Vancouver Island. Our home was a place that straddled the cultural, linguistic, and political worlds that come with having a British mother and a Quebecois father. Our nomadic lifestyle took us across Canada and back again. These influences are echoed in the work I make, drawing from fragments of everyday life and coastal living. My large-scale textile works are often presented in diptych and triptych forms where dialogues and stories are exchanged.
Bio
Michelle Sirois Silver's recent works explore themes around aging and the natural environment. Known for her exploration, she investigates ways to integrate materials and techniques, adding layers of visual narrative to support the conceptual narrative of the work. Her art practice encompasses the hand hooked surface, surface design, and sculpture.
Michelle Sirois Silver exhibits nationally and internationally. Her hand hooked work exhibited in the Craft Council of British Columbia’s Provincial Exhibition 2020 “Personal Materials and Geographies”. In June 2021 she was invited to exhibit her soft sculpture titled “Ice Islands” at the Biennale Internationale DuLin du Portneuf in Deschambault, Quebec. In 2022 her surface design work titled "The Artist Archetype" exhibited at the Living Arts Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma and her most recent soft sculpture titled "The Power Within" exhibited at the Il Museo Gallery in Vancouver, Canada.
She lives and works from her studio in Victoria on Vancouver Island.