Shary Boyle: How We Are

We are living through an extraordinary moment in history. Polarization, surveillance, instability, and a sense of untethered chaos shape our days. But we have been here before.

A century ago—between two World Wars—the Surrealists forged a revolutionary language in art, literature, and politics, answering crisis with imagination. Today, artists and thinkers once again respond to a world marked by alienation, conflict, and fear.

These times ask for another kind of vocabulary—one capable of holding contradictions, honouring complexity, and carrying us through the difficult work of speaking with both conviction and care. Making sense of our moment is painful, but not without hope.

Shary Boyle wades into these charged spaces with an ethic of social justice and a deep belief in the transformative power of imagination. When she says, “I feel the need to create an alternate world, a vision of what might be magical or beautiful or fantastic about being human,” it is not an escape but a strategy of survival—a way to envision continuance in the face of rupture.

For the first time in Boyle’s thirty-year exhibition history, How We Are presents a survey of her socio-political artworks. Created by the artist to reveal and comprehend the most harrowing complexities of our time—gendered violence, white supremacy, colonialism, war, authoritarianism, extinction, censorship, and on. We typically encounter these subjects through media, news analysis, and academic literature. That is, words.

But what of narrative images and objects made by hand? Fragile, imperfect, and undeniably human. There is no ‘authority’ to dazzle or diminish us. Instead, the artist’s vulnerability is a gesture of faith and trust, a reminder that care itself is a form of resistance.

Boyle seeks a way to better understand our systems and tendencies, while acknowledging our failures and harms honestly and with grace. Spending time with something crafted with deep personal care counters our disposable habits of scrolling, swiping, and erasing. It creates a reciprocal commitment between artist and viewer to think and feel together. It is an antidote to isolation.

In this way, Boyle’s practice draws our attention to urgent yet quietly normalized social and political ills, inviting us toward a collective turning. By lifting us beyond the confines of the everyday, she opens spaces where wonder might coexist with inquiry—where respectful conversation can deepen into a personal reckoning with our beliefs and unspoken longings.

Somewhere within these imagined terrains lie the dreams of better selves and more just societies. And woven through them all is a reminder of our place within something bigger, more intricate, and far greater than any one of us is alone.

Shary Boyle’s multidisciplinary work considers the social history of ceramic figures, animist mythologies, antiquated technologies and folk-art forms to create a symbolic, feminist and politically charged language uniquely her own. Her practice is activated through collaboration and mentorship, engaging other creative communities and makers with a characteristically inclusive spirit. Boyle represented Canada with her project Music for Silence at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, her sculptures were featured at the 2017 Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in South Korea, and she created a commissioned video work for the 2021 Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania. Shary Boyle is the recipient of Canada’s Hnatyshyn Foundation Award, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and holds a 2021 Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Outside the Palace of Me, a major solo exhibition of recent work, organized by Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, traveled to The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2023), the Museum of Art and Design in NYC (2023/24), and the Mackenzie Art Gallery (2024).