Scherry Shi was born in China and raised across China, New Zealand and the UK. She graduated from BA Fashion Design Womenswear at Central Saint Martins (2014) and is currently completing her MA in Print at Royal College of Art(2023). Recent exhibitions include Two Fold at Southwark Park Galleries (2023), and Fomalis at The Bottle Factory (2021).
Scherry Shi
Place and placelessness,
individuality and collectivity,
mobility and fixedness,
are constantly mingling and interchanging for diasporic individuals.
The relationships between a place and its inhabitants are central to my practice. Whether the place is a land: a mine, that offers people jobs and attracts immigrant workers to settle down from afar. Whether it is a personal space: a domestic room, that envelops one’s lived experience. Or it is a home, or homes, in which one’s identity is intrinsically associated with and constructed from.
My practice attempts to explore how places shape and impact a person and a community’s identity over time and in reverse, how diasporic individuals adapt to a place and reconstruct the place as their own.
Having lived in different countries with diverse cultural backgrounds, I am interested in the idea of diasporas and diasporic identity and belongings from both an individual’s and a collectives’ perspectives in an unpredicted, fast-changing world. Through working with expanded fields of print, photography, text, textile and interactive installation to create and reconstruct spaces I am evoking a sense of place to address my complex research interests.
UV print on aged rice paper, 2023.
69cm x 25.5cm
Medium:
UV print on handmade paper.
Close up installation view at Southwark Park Galleries exhibition, 2023
rootless,
as a weightless feather
carried by the wind,
drifting in the air
away from the ground,
floating
across the continents...
On a stuffy hazy day,
looking out through the dusty ferry windows above the mother river
as the land comes closer on the fore,
visions of the cityscape blur behind me.
Enveloped by the international water,
muds surging from the undercurrent tells the story of the forgotten memories from afar.
Medium:
Digital print on fabric.Size:
200cm x 200cm x 240cmWarning: This section contains mature or explicit content.
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Medium:
Letterpress on cyanotype fabric in paper boxes.Size:
Fabrics: approx. 20cm x 28cm Box: 10cm x 15cm x 4.5cmWarning: This section contains mature or explicit content.
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Since the Covid-19 epidemic, I have been having conversations with people while photographing them nude in their own bedrooms.
Differing from traditional forms of portraiture photography (mostly male dominated), when subjects are being posed and manipulated by the photographer, I intend to create a safe place where an intimate exchange of vulnerabilities meets, and a genuine closeness takes place.
Camera serves a role of documentation and nude acts as a method to strip off the façade from an individual. The conversations theme around vulnerability on bodies; insecurities on identity and belongings and one’s relationship to home.
Medium:
Mixed MediaSize:
Various sizes (palm size)
Giclée print, 2019. 229cm x 73cm
Digital print on Hahnemühle paper, 2020. 68.5cm x 47.5cm
Digital print on Hahnemühle paper, 2020.
Approx. 44.6cm x 39.5cm
Intrigued by the rapid development of the mining industry in the past decade, I embarked on my journey to South Africa as it is one of the remaining major mining countries in the current climate.
The series of images were taken in Tsantsabane, a major transportation node where ores exploited locally are transferred to Port Elizabeth, the major port in South Africa, and to the rest of the world. Inspired by the movement of mining commodities and the way in which the mining industry is reshaping, a narrative has been developed to depict the every-day fast paced working industrial landscape in 21st century’s South Africa.
I intend to explore questions around the values of the diasporic workers, who relocated or got dislocated within the process, the geographical migration of the industry, and the impacts of technology on them.