HEAVY SHINE emerges from an ongoing collaboration between Toronto-based ceramic artist Dianne Lee and New Orleans-based visual artist Robyn LeRoy-Evans. Creating an archive of their own bodies in contact with the specific materials of clay, fabric, and paint, the artists explore how their gendered labour creates a formal language: folds of skin that mimic fabric, the gesture of hands recorded on the walls of a clay pot, movement captured in a photograph. The artists draw on ancient Greek vases, the luxurious drapery of Western portraiture, and second-wave feminism’s centering of the body as vessel to critique legacies of privilege and power. The work is presented as a collaborative, multimedia installation of collage, drawing, ceramic vessels, still lives, and arranged tableaus that speak to the process-based relationship between the artists, as well as their shared interest in the domestic object and contemporary conversations around women working together.

Curated by Sequoia Miller