Sheri Osden Nault
Worrystones, 2025
Sheri Osden Nault,Worrystones, 2025
Nault’sWorrystones explore gift-giving and the development of reciprocal relationships as a collaborative mode of art production and collection. A series of 10, each ceramicWorrystone will be given to another artist in return for their agreement to: 1. carry the stone in their pocket as often as they can, 2. use it as a worrystone, holding on to or rubbing as absent-minded comfort, and 3. provide documentation, or lend the stone for exhibition, as needed.
At a time when 2SLGBTQIA+ people face mounting threats to their well-being, billionaires-cum-pseudo-leaders are openly signalling their endorsement of white supremacy, campaigns of genocide are proceeding unimpeded by international law, and already urgent ecological devastation is becoming more rapid, propelled by unrelenting bombing campaigns, ineffective and resource-sucking large language model AIs, and the billionaire class – it is clear there is much to worry about.
Tongue-in-cheek, Nault offers themself symbolically through the gifted worrystone and joins the recipient in an ongoing relationship, connected by their gift. As a friend and confidant, artist-comrades are invited to reach for/to them in times of worry and to maintain a long-term, caring relationship.
Worrystones thematically builds upon the project No Vacant Wild, ongoing since 2018 in which plaster-concrete replicas of the artist’s nipples are dispersed along shorelines. Originating in studio experiments where they sought to replicate beach stones with fragments of their body, No Vacant Wild playfully disrupts colonial constructions of an wilderness in which the historic co-existence of Indigenous peoples can be erased and queerness is “unnatural.” Part of the landscape, these stone-like fragments of Nault’s queer, Métis body are temporary reminders the landscape is not, and has never been, vacant.
At a time when 2SLGBTQIA+ people face mounting threats to their well-being, billionaires-cum-pseudo-leaders are openly signalling their endorsement of white supremacy, campaigns of genocide are proceeding unimpeded by international law, and already urgent ecological devastation is becoming more rapid, propelled by unrelenting bombing campaigns, ineffective and resource-sucking large language model AIs, and the billionaire class – it is clear there is much to worry about.
Tongue-in-cheek, Nault offers themself symbolically through the gifted worrystone and joins the recipient in an ongoing relationship, connected by their gift. As a friend and confidant, artist-comrades are invited to reach for/to them in times of worry and to maintain a long-term, caring relationship.
Worrystones thematically builds upon the project No Vacant Wild, ongoing since 2018 in which plaster-concrete replicas of the artist’s nipples are dispersed along shorelines. Originating in studio experiments where they sought to replicate beach stones with fragments of their body, No Vacant Wild playfully disrupts colonial constructions of an wilderness in which the historic co-existence of Indigenous peoples can be erased and queerness is “unnatural.” Part of the landscape, these stone-like fragments of Nault’s queer, Métis body are temporary reminders the landscape is not, and has never been, vacant.
|
|
|
|
Sheri Osden Nault is a Two-Spirit Métis artist, community worker, and Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Western Ontario. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. They explore embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as artistic frameworks, prioritizing tactile ways of knowing and learning from more-than-human kin. Their research engages decolonizing methodologies, queer theory, ecological theory, and intersectional and Indigenous feminisms. They are a tattooer, researcher, and organizer within the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada and they run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Nault currently lives and works between London, Ontario - on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapéwak, and Chonnonton Nations - and Mohkinstsis, or “Calgary” - on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, and the Stoney Nakoda, signatories of Treaty 7. They are Métis of the Charette, Bélanger, and Nault families.
Nault currently lives and works between London, Ontario - on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapéwak, and Chonnonton Nations - and Mohkinstsis, or “Calgary” - on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, and the Stoney Nakoda, signatories of Treaty 7. They are Métis of the Charette, Bélanger, and Nault families.
