Sharon Whitham

I am a printmaker and mixed-media artist. My work is inspired by both nature and culture, focused on themes of balance, loss and change, and our connections to each other and the natural world. I am particularly interested in the idea of balance in its many forms: physical; spiritual; cultural; juggling the demands of contemporary life; and navigating a path through a very complex world. My work is also influenced by the current crises around immigration, climate change, tolerance, equality, and justice.

I am inspired by the beauty, resilience and changes that occur in the natural world, and most especially the paradox of permanence/impermanence. I am drawn to the organic shapes, patterns and colors in nature, particularly rocks, feathers, leaves and water. Much of my work uses the imagery of cairns, which are balanced mounds of stones, typically built by fellow travelers from rocks found in the landscape. They are carefully placed and balanced to mark a trail or path to help guide others. I see cairns as a way to connect to nature, history and those that have traveled before us.

Sharon Whitham has been creating art ever since she can remember. She loves nothing more than working with what she can scavenge, pull from her stash and take inspiration from around her. She spends part of each year working out of her studio in the Boston area, living on an island off the coast of Maine, and creating art in Mexico. Sharon majored in Fine Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and hold degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Harvard University in Boston, MA. She continues to study, stretch and grow her art practice with courses, workshops and art collaborations. She is represented by Artemis Gallery (Northeast Harbor, ME), Mystic Osprey Gallery (Richmond, VA) and BostonArt at the Boston Design Center in MA. Sharon is a member of Shared Habitat Earth (SHE), an art and activism collective focused on the effects of climate change. She is also a proud longtime member of the 10×6 Women’s Art Collective in the Boston area. Her passion is printmaking, as it’s a whole brain process, both technical and creative, as well as physical. She loves the unpredictability, the serendipity, the limitless possibilities and the journey.

Sharon’s work is shown regularly throughout the New England area as well as at national and international galleries and exhibitions. Sharon hopes her work conveys a sense of the paradoxical beauty of nature, our uniqueness and what we have in common as creatures on this earth, as well as the struggles we all face in making the hard choices that affect our lives, the lives of others and our shared planet.