Sharyn Wortman FRSA

Sharyn Wortman (b. Melbourne, Australia) is an artist based in London.

She received a Bachelor of Visual Communication (Hons) from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, a further Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) from the Hong Kong School of Art and a Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art, London. Wortman is a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in London and a Yeoman of The Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers alias Wire Workers of the City of London. She was a finalist in the Hong Kong Human Rights Art Prize (2020) and was named by the Observer as one of The Future 500 Rising Stars. She has exhibited her work in London, Hong Kong and Australia.

‘I collaborate with clay, space and time; these images are a record of the encounter’.

Working at the intersection of the haptic and the optic, Wortman seeks to escape the boundaries of medium, and presents the audience with realms of otherness. Exploring the materiality of the possible, rather than creating heavy matter, she manifests liminal spaces that quiver on the edge of their own disappearance. 

In the words of Willem de Kooning, this is neither a labyrinth, nor a network, but rather an offering of content as ‘a glimpse of something’.

Wortman says that ‘photography works to stop time so that we may look and see. Crumbling clay and gestural marks indicate the fragility of my encounter’.

Portrait by Katia Autier