Sharl G. Smith
Shelter II

Shelter II is a large-scale beaded sculpture that ambitiously expands on the artist’s beadwork practice. Over the last two years, Smith has radically up-scaled her process applying weaving techniques employed in glass bead-stitching to create a sculpture incorporating hundreds of grapefruit-sized mirror polished stainless steel beads tensioned together using steel cable. The end result is a gargantuan beadwork that has immense physical presence and a surface that slyly reflects and distorts its surroundings. While building on the artist’s training in architecture, Shelter II is also a rebuke to the dismissal of beading as “women’s work” within the context of a patriarchal Western art history rather than as a viable and transgressive art form in its own right.