Artist Q & A: Sheri Paisley

In this new artist Q & A, Sheri Paisley reflects on the enveloping nature of the West Coast ocean, the cellular and emotional memory of the sea within ourselves, and how for her painting becomes less about representation and more about resonance. When You Were the Sea opens on Saturday, October 4 in Bau-Xi Vancouver's Main Gallery and runs through October 16, 2025.

1. The title When You Were the Sea suggests memory and transformation. How did that title come to you, and what does it hold for you emotionally or spiritually?

I felt it in my body and wrote it down in the middle of working. It carried the idea that what shapes us isn’t fixed - people, places, even our own history - they move through us and leave their tide lines. The title holds that motion: what is often thought of as separate is recognized as a significant part of you, and it keeps shifting.

Sheri Paisley, Y43 Off Amphitrite. Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches


2. You describe the ocean as both an external force and an internal presence. Can you speak more about how this duality influences your approach to your art?

Here, the ocean is constant, in the sound, in the air, in how the day feels on your skin. I don’t try to paint it directly; I work with the way it presses on everything. That sense of pressure and movement affects how I build a painting - how much to layer, how much to leave exposed.

3. You reference the “fog-thick quiet” of Ucluelet. How does solitude factor into your creative process? Is it a refuge, a challenge, or something else entirely?

It’s all of the above. Solitude facilitates space for the work to show itself, but it also makes me sit with what I might rather want to avoid. I need that space, regardless. It allows me to slow down, and in that slowing down is when the resonant, more deeply interconnected decisions are made.

Sheri Paisley, Ocean Edge of the Rainforest. Oil on canvas, 60 x 66 inches


4. You say “each mark is an act of belonging.” How do you navigate between planned intention and in-the-moment intuition in your mark-making? Are there moments when the painting “knows” more than you do?

I think the painting always knows more than I do. It’s up to me to constantly improve my awareness and listening skills. Initially the mark making is a flurry of conversation. Like two people first meeting with so much in common and endless things to talk about. Gradually as the painting progresses, the conversation grows into a quiet kind of embodied listening and knowing. A deeper ebb and flowing where everything is feel and non-verbal. Some marks stay; some have to go. The painting has its own plan inside my initial plan. Listening and following that deep, embodied voice is what makes the piece honest and come to life. 

5. Your palette is rooted in the Pacific Northwest - driftwood, kelp, weathered light. How do you translate these elements into paint? Is your palette intuitive or deliberately mixed?

I don’t actually know. I don’t know how this works. I feel colours inside me like how I experience food. Like how something tastes and what might taste good together. A lot of trial and error I guess? With colour theory and personal preferences as well as a desire to learn more. There’s always so much to learn and I love experimenting.

6. You write, “This series offers no answers - only places to return to.” What makes a painting a place to return to, for you? Has your sense of belonging changed through the making of this work?

I think a painting holds a person when it stays open and seems to evolve over time.  When it gives a person room to keep looking without telling them what to see. That’s what makes me return to a piece: it keeps breathing and shifting somehow. Making this series shifted something for me - belonging feels less like arriving and more like staying in a kind of momentum with what’s around me.