February to July 2024

Residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 

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Sharl G. Smith is a Waterloo-based sculptor and former architectural professional, working primarily with bead-stitching as a means of exploring her identity, global themes of equity, and care-based value systems. Bead-stitching is the act of creating objects by stitching beads together, one or two at a time. Smith sees parallels in the process of beadwork—the combining of discrete units into a whole, using a tension-based network—with diverse biological and sociological systems.

Project description

For their residency, Sharl G. Smith will make beads in developing a performance in collaboration with a choreographer and dancers. Centring traditions stigmatized by Christian colonialism, Smith investigates the spiritual aspects of the Yoruba religion in West Africa and its connection to Jamaican religions like Myal, Obeah, and Revivalism. These marginalized traditions form the lifeblood of Jamaica’s African heritage and heavily influence modern music and dance across the African diaspora. Smith uses this research, along with their review of the AGO’s collection with the curatorial team, to create a dance performance that highlights beadwork as a carrier of history and knowledge through the lens of decolonization. Smith will work with dancers to represent and hold large beads in a live-action bead-weaving ceremony slated for late spring, 2024.

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In response to the theme of movement, sculptor and AGO x RBC Artist-In-Residence Sharl G. Smith premiers a performance work that builds upon ongoing research and the experience of beading large-scale networks of tension and geometry into sculptural forms. Smith’s large beadwork sculptures insist on a collaborative practice, requiring multiple people to choreograph their movements together to make the sculpture. The artist brings this making method to the stage in exploring her Jamaican culture through the lens of African diasporic spiritual heritage and her art practice. She offers a shared experience, centered on survival, healing, and rebuilding, and aims to give light, air and breath through these histories.

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(a)Mending: the ọ́bị̀à experience explores sounds and movements from pre-colonial West Africa that endured the Atlantic Slave Trade and transformed into Ọ́bị̀à, Myal, and Revivalism in the Caribbean and Americas. It celebrates these potent medicinal practices, rooted in indigenous energy-based sciences, as a restorative antidote to ongoing colonial violence. Through a live interactive bead weaving ceremony, the audience will participate in creating a new beadwork sculpture while being immersed in waves of acoustic vibrations.