STATEMENT
My interdisciplinary practice engages with loss as a persistent, embodied presence. Through drawing, printmaking, glass, and other media, I often work with fragile or overlooked materials—shed hair, tattered dog toys, ephemeral lines—that carry the residue of what has been lost and yet remains. Loss in my work is often unnameable, a weight registered more in the body than in language, an absence heavy with the nearness of what cannot be held.
I am drawn to the places where language fractures, slips, disintegrates, and experience settles as sensory sediment. My practice is grounded in a belief in the tactile intimacies between beings, where attention to the more-than-human and interspecies world offers ways of knowing rooted in touch, proximity, and shared existence. My collaborative works with my dogs are grounded in forms of co-making shaped by reciprocal attunement, woven through shared rhythms rather than symbolic representation.
These works are sustained by ethics of care—an attentiveness to fragility, to duration, and to the slow unfolding of connection. My drawings and installations inhabit thresholds—between language and silence, visibility and disappearance—where presences and absences drift. The indexical remnants of existence trace not only memory, but the knotted residue of what remains unspoken.
BIO
Sharyn O’Mara is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice spans several media including glass, drawing, photography, and printmaking, and is interconnected by her interest in the marks of language and the language of marks.
O’Mara’s work has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and is in several public and private collections in the U.S., including The Corning Museum of Glass, Toledo Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, and The Fox School of Business at Temple University. She is an Associate Professor and the Director of MFA Programs in Art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She has also taught at RISD and The Kansas City Art Institute. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her husband, daughter, and their two shepherds.
