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Canadian born, Sheila Vollmer is London based after post-graduate studies in Sculpture at St. Martin's School of Art, London 1988 and BA Honours Art, University of Guelph, Canada 1985. She was Sculpture Program Manager at Morley College London 2003-2025 and been an APT studio member since its inception 1995.
Vollmer has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with highlights including:
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| Sheila Vollmer APT Studios 6 Creekside Deptford London SE8 3EW Tel: +44 020 8244 6873 sheilavollmer@gmail.com Download CV >> |
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Other web sites featuring her work are: https://www.aptstudios.org/sheila-vollmer https://sculptors.org.uk/artists/sheila-vollmer |
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| Text ©Sheila Vollmer 2026 | ||||
| Reviews | ||||
| "There’s something magical and newly resilient in the beauty Sheila creates that the hard lines of steel never expected. To remain upright, even jaunty, amid entropy and collapse, is an act of both resistance and celebration. Sheila’s work also deals with resilience in the face of collapse. One sculpture resembles a jagged jumble of climbing letters in an alphabet we don’t know. We make an effort to read it, fail and begin to accept its strangeness. I speak of language to ascertain what these objects want to say. What are they holding on to? The wall, the floor, or each other? A blue square metal ‘painting’ has broken away from the wall into a sculptural line of grey that twists rhythmically back into a blue frame on the ground. What seems inflexible opens up new flexibilities in the mind. Here is a problem trying to solve itself, like logic applied to honey. In another of Sheila’s sculptures, a black water wheel or giant cog appears as something mechanical but can’t move or be moved, like a Filofax operated by an iPhone. Elsewhere, remnants of a lost industrial age – stacked, rusted metal struts – relish their uselessness with an insert of lime green, triangular joy. Sheila’s work explores the awkward and even comic pleasure of redundancy. Through challenging obsolescence, these sculptures emit the energy of reinvention, innovation and the bold adaptability of surprise." Excerpts from essay by Cherry Smyth Two Singers One Song, 2-person exhibition with painter Jackie Askew, May 2026 https://www.cherrysmyth.com/ @cherrysmythpoet |
"It is her use of basic angle iron that marks Sheila Vollmer’s sculpture as being direct and open. She pushes the material to its limits through fundamental methodology, creating as wide a range of possibilities and solutions as she is able. .... the addition of colour either marks its construction, or alternatively acts as a renegade component. Her sculptures exhibit energy, movement, contradiction and fine balance." Excerpts from Steel - Sculpture in the Workplace at Canary Wharf curated & written by Ann Elliott, 2006 for Canary Wharf Group |
"When we observe one of Vollmer’s sculptures two qualities emerge as paramount: geometric complexity within a deceptive simplicity and what may be described as “interiorness”. The geometry proceeds not from a preconceived idea but as a natural consequence of the aesthetic of the forms that constitute it. It is not the geometry of Euclid. If we attempt to follow a line it comes upon an impasse or is subverted by another line that itself teases the eye into a linear cull de sac. Consequently we cannot visually segment the work into its parts but are constrained to perceive it as a totality. Each sculpture in its different way encompasses a hollow at its centre. Its effect is to soften the hard edges of the material and to lead us into its heart. We sense that we can pass beyond the unyielding angles, verticals and horizontals into a space that is created by form but is not formalist." "Sheila Vollmer’s sculpture owes nothing to figuration or mimesis yet it invokes the natural world which surrounds us." Excerpts from Lionel Phillips: the Sculptures of Sheila Vollmer |
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| "Canadian-born Sheila Vollmer’s work could be seen as lying in an interesting mid zone, somewhere between the environment-based spatial reveries of a Rachel Whiteread and the neo-modernism of early Tucker or Willard Boepple...colour is descriptive but generally clean...the scale is precise, there is a high degree of articulation within the whole, the concern is to create an experience that is sure and special. Vollmer is particularlyinterested in this process of development, how a sculpture achieves a necessity of form by replicating and improvising on basic units of form, the non-contradiction of achieving an organic wholeness in a systematic way. The great achievement of her work is the frequency with which she achieves that sense of completeness and right-ness whilst also giving the feeling that the form has been caught at a point of arrest;..." Excerpts from A Various Art by John Cornall – for the exhibition Influx by forms in flux 1997 |
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