Bio

Kristin Sjaarda is a photographic, textile, and ceramics artist based in Toronto, Ontario, where she lives with her husband and three sons. She attended The Colorado Institute of Art in Denver, Colorado on a full tuition scholarship, graduating in 1994. Known for lush large scale still-life images of local flora and fauna from her garden and urban environment, she frequently collaborates with The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to include real specimens of birds in her arrangements. She has also designed silk scarves using her own imagery, taught workshops on floral arrangement and natural-light still life photography and designed her own ceramics for use in her photos. Sheridan College and the Ontario Science Centre have invited Kristin to lecture on the intersection of art and ecology. Her work has been collected internationally and a select portfolio has been published in CandyFloss Magazine (2021), Women United Art Magazine (2023) and Create Magazine (2023). In September, 2022 she was an Artist in Residence at Kingsbrae Gardens in New Brunswick, Canada, and in October, 2022 Smokestack Gallery in Hamilton, Ontario hosted her first Solo Show.

Statement

Using the style of Dutch Golden Age painters as a jumping-off point, and objects passed down to me from my Dutch grandmother’s family, my photographs depict flora from my downtown Toronto neighborhood as well as seasonal, local fauna. While the 17th-century artworks were made in an era of expansion and exploitation, my images strive to depict what is now threatened by climate change. The images are a reflection of both my heritage and the city that I live in and are printed and presented at larger-than-life scale to render these fragile subjects in a manner that is powerful, provocative, and immersive.
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In the series Plastics, I also include foraged and scavenged pieces of discarded plastic. In the spring, once the snow has melted, public spaces in Toronto seem to fill with surprising quantities of thawed-out, wind-blown garbage. It is both extremely ugly - - and therefore mostly ignored by passers-by - - and beautiful in a winter-worn way as trash drapes in trees and catches on fences. In my earlier photographs, I restricted myself to incorporating only local species of flowers, birds and insects, and other items produced by Nature. With Plastics, I felt that it was time to also incorporate the manufactured debris that is so prevalent in an urban setting.
Plastic is inevitable and unavoidable, woven into not just our built environment but also our parks and oceans, the food we eat, and by extension our very bodies. These images are an attempt to acknowledge this.
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“In Sjaarda’s recent works, vanitas is no longer a symbolic reminder of the inherent transience of solely human mortality, but rather looks farther outward instead – an admonition to respect and preserve the ecosystem and environment at large that supports human existence itself.” -Tara Westerman, curator

www.kristinsjaarda.com
@ksjaar