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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 1987 and BA Honors Art, University of Guelph, Canada. She is Sculpture Program Manager and Tutor at Morley College London for over 30 years and has been an APT member since its inception 1995. Sheila Vollmer’s oeuvre is primarily focused on geometric and organic abstract sculpture and installations using materials such as wood, steel, Perspex, rope and sometimes castings to investigate formal concepts of line, form, space, rhythm and mood. Her sculptures explore and draw inspiration from primarily the materials she works with but also architectural structures and natural systems of growth, reflecting on the physical and emotional interactions with the resulting constructions and spaces. Her sculptures exhibit a geometric intricacy that eschews traditional Euclidean geometry, instead creating a seamless totality that draws viewers into the central hollow of each piece. Additionally, Sheila integrates colour to enhance the visual rhythm, viewpoints and mood of the work. Her sculptures vary widely in size, encompassing hand-sized items to installations and larger outdoor works. Vollmer has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with solo exhibitions and commissions in London and Canada 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 2025 | ||||
| Reviews | ||||
| "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 |
"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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