Anna Shapiro

Anna is known as the wavelady for over a decade of making waves. She has been recognized with awards and residencies for her sculpture and performance work. She has presented on panels about ecofeminism and has been published in alternative newspapers and an anthology. Recently Anna has partnered with The Feminist Art Project and the Hive Archive for inquiry into the current wave of feminism.

Piecework is an evolving body of work including collage, assemblage, sculpture and painting provoked by contemporary issues, domestic and global, of gender, aggression and consumption. Piecework has many meanings: quilting, payment by the piece, having a piece (owning a gun) and also peace work- activism based on social justice and pacifism. These meanings are stitched together in the tactile essence and concept of quilting.

In general, my work is gestural, momentary and playful, fleshed from corners of life, an echelon of china sets, glitter, guns and plastic. The forms are a grammar culled from the lexicon of ancestors; genetic and social, bridging three centuries of collected, donated, found and preserved objects. The collection is a heritage — a diary of daily encounters and exchanges with others, embodying the logic of a magpie and a pack rat.

Like a house of cards, delicate and structural, these works topple and teeter from the slightest tremor or breeze. It is extreme delicacy, an emotional place and a political perspective. Balance is roiled and flushed; the result is ambivalence, the challenge between abstraction and reality, thought and action.

The dictionary of shapes, cutouts, stencils, positive and negative forms, reproduce and evolve in the studio. The process is at the speed of the sewn line, hand made, machine made, chance, pop and slick. Herein lies the transformative magic of collage: painting in form, beauty in color, and exuberance of texture and line.