About
Bio
Joyce Shi is an interdisciplinary artist exploring ritual and seduction through sculptures made of wood, glass, and stone. She graduated from RISD with a BFA degree in Glass. Her work is informed by her multi-cultural identity, as well as her interest in transformation, craft, and alchemy. She is currently based in Vancouver, BC.Statement
My practice explores ritual as sustenance for displaced nostalgia, activating a sense of the body as a juncture of collective memories and narrative. In examining the recurrence of ritualistic practice across time, I look to ritual’s past, finding both points of contact and the constraints of cultural loss. These encounters accumulate as “charges” within my work, forming a visual language that translates narrative dynamics into a material presence. These charges map onto my sculptures, which give form to emotional touchstones found within cycles of estrangement and homecoming. The loss from the breakdown of memory’s building blocks derives antidote from narrative.
My process is centered around rewiring fixed relations between materials and their surrounding elements. My background in Glass informs my approach to wood, stone, and metals. Being such a responsive material, glass holds the visual imprints of every shift in touch, movement, and gravity. These visual imprints on the material make my own directives impossible to disentangle from those of larger forces at work. My relationship with material is a collaboration of which mutual transformations occur, one where memories are exchanged and remade. My process, in turn, becomes a ritual in which I find solid grounding within myself.