Sheelagh Frew Crane
Sheelagh Frew Crane is a multidisciplinary artist, who works with found objects and materials collected on repeated visits from her local environment, sound, poetry and film. Her practice investigates the Anthropocene with attentive awareness for discarded remnants of consumerism -weathered, non-natural materials that often resurface unrecognizable, their original existences dissolved by time.
Found in a condition of dormancy, these objects now find new life within fresh contexts. Through delicate arrangements around these materials and collaborations with natural materials, Frew Crane creates works that evoke both otherness and familiarity, inviting viewers to "see something new within familiar things."
Her research explores changing meteorology and natural cycles, integrating autobiographical connections to human experiences of unpredictability, loss, change, and resilience. Areas of fragility, strength, and transformation emerge through her use of fragmented, eroding materials that convey a sense of incompleteness, absence, memory, and gradual entropy. These relics of past lives echo into the present, reawakening as conduits with agency, possessing their own energy and fluidity. Her arrangements continually shift in this fluid process, emulating the constancy of change, until it arrives at a place that feels right, resonating to materials' histories and her artistic intuition, creating a dialogue between past and present.
Rather than repairing or reconstructing objects, Frew Crane's work represents a rescue and recovery, finding new purposes that reflect resilience in our evolving, unstable times. Her practice is underpinned by concepts of posthumanism, new materialism, and human behaviours, and is deeply connected to her ecological environment, practice of urban permaculture, and spirituality.
