sadie sheldon: briefly

Sibyl Gallery is delighted to present briefly, an exhibition of new works by interdisciplinary artist Sadie Sheldon. The work will be on view at the gallery from March 28 through May 11, 2025. 

Sheldon’s world folds and unfolds, a suitcase of salvaged things—found objects, fabric, plastic, paper, thin metals—stitched together in restless configurations that never fully settle. The output dances between the second, third, and fourth dimension (time), not exactly paintings, nor sculptures, nor performance but often managing to be all at once. It expands across years and landscapes, shaped by what is available, what is lost, and what can be carried forward. Like the work itself, her practice is itinerant, adapting to each place it lands, absorbing its rhythms and materials before moving again. It does not ask to be held still but lingers just long enough to leave a trace—briefly.

Over the past four years, Sheldon has developed a lexicon for introspective analysis that she calls meridians. The development of this tool for insight began with a collection of discarded objects fashioned into silver rings that led to Sheldon’s considering the confluence of choice and chance, both of which work together in unknowable ways to guide individuals (and objects) along their life’s journeys. Borrowing its structure from divinatory practices of old such as the I-Ching, Tarot, and Astrology, Sheldon developed a system of 64 cards grounded in eight archetypes of the Feminine, each with their own distinct traits–the Attendant, the Visitor, the Courier, the Magpie, the Enigma, the Composer, the Archivist, and the Scout. Each handmade meridian card, collaged and sewn, represents an archetypical dyad with a dominant and submissive archetype. 

Drawn from Sheldon’s personal writings in a quest for self discovery and wholly original in its conceptual framework, the process begins with the rolling of two custom eight-sided dice and a coin flip to determine the dominant archetype. Sheldon asks that each participant approach the process with a question, a problem, a sensibility or possibility, allowing for the system to guide them towards deeper understanding of themselves through a respect for happenstance and a pattern recognition in the seemingly chaotic. The meridians cannot show the future, but instead offer a framework towards an understanding of one’s position within the infinite nexus of reality, in which the narrative of every individual, place, and object is interwoven. They can provide answers, but only those that already lie within. 

Following the development and implementation of the meridians, Sheldon began composing larger-than-life portraits of individuals who have partaken in the ritual. Sheldon paints each subject in acrylic, then cuts and collages the pieces sewing them together with discarded materials. The portraits read as dreamscapes, the results of the Meridian reading made material. Colored lines and dots might seem abstractly familiar because they are. Process color patches, a system of standardized codes designed to ensure consistency for mass color printing of commercial packaged goods, nod to Sheldon’s habit of sewing and collaging disposable packaging into her works. Bringing this visible/invisible commercial symbology to the forefront of our field of vision, she asks us to question what other hidden structures might guide and govern visual culture? Everything we see, we see filtered through the subconscious filter of our experiences. We see these symbols everywhere without actually seeing them. Though generally standardized, in Sheldon’s painting each symbol becomes entirely unique and unreproducible. 

Though all are welcome to participate in the readings, Sheldon’s portraits depict only those with a connection to femininity, asserting the Feminine as an active force of divine wisdom. With the figures rendered in greyscale, Sheldon hints at a liminal space outside of reality where the sitters cease to be their individual selves, instead becoming the archetypes they embody. The portraits pull from the readings, as well as the conversations that ensued as the individuals opened themselves up to the universe’s unknowable possibilities. 

ABOUT SADIE SHELDON

Sadie Sheldon lives and works between Brooklyn and New Orleans, traveling extensively for residencies and opportunities abroad. She received her BA in Art and Media Studies from Kalamazoo College, and her MFA in Sculpture from Tulane University. She has spent time working at The Vermont Studio Center, Basement6 in Shanghai, The Birdsell Project, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Kuona Trust in Nairobi, the Textile Art Center, the Elsewhere Museum, Stove Works, the Tides Institute, the Joan Mitchell Center, and Sculpture Space in Utica, New York.