Sally Thurlow is a multi-disciplinary artist living on the shores of Lake Ontario near Toronto. Her practice, based in sculpture, installation, photography and painting, invites the contemplation of humanist, environmental, cultural, and spiritual issues as they manifest in our daily lives. Thurlow’’s material choices are chosen carefully, symbolic within the meaning of her forms, be they driftwood, live wood, woven fabrics, aluminum mesh, steel, fibreglass, paper, photography, painting, plexiglass, or robotic. For several years she has been exploring the dynamic range of archetypal figurative forms using driftwood, and other ephemera collected in her wanderings of inquiry often leading to vital juxtapositions. Increasingly sophisticated, her work has evolved to a new kind of surrealism that includes the manufactured, the machined, and the robotic.  

In her latest exhibition, SYSTEMS FAILURE: AUGUST 31 TO SEPTEMBER 24, 2016  these forms grieve the breakdown of family, to larger groups - friends, corporations, political parties, to world organizations, in an ever-spiralling broken system.  Here we confront the visual force of four alienated characters who all have rib-cages - familiar yet uncomfortably strange… with expectations of each other.
 

Sally Thurlow received a BA majoring in Fine Arts from the University of Toronto, finishing with Cultural and Environmental Studies at Trent University, with significant earlier studies at OCAD and George Brown College. She has given numerous artist talks and workshops at educational institutions and public galleries. Her work has been shown internationally and she has been the recipient of various Ontario Arts Council Awards. She is a member of The Iris Group and The Red Head Gallery, both artists’ collectives. Her work is held in private collections across Canada, and at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa ON. For more information please visit her website:  www.sallythurlow.com and You Tube: Sally Thurlow, for a four minute video.