Mixed media artist Sadie Sheldon began collecting beautiful trash off the streets of New Orleans around a decade ago. She lists small items that might capture her attention, such as: “a lost earring, a rusted key, a plastic cap from a bottle long gone. Objects without purpose, scattered across sidewalks, caught in gutters, buried in junk drawers […] an accidental archive.” During the pandemic, Sheldon began repurposing these fragments into wearable rings set in silver solder, creating charged and unique amulets. Throughout her practice, Sheldon’s alchemy transforms the seemingly worthless into the wondrously worthwhile.
As the artist made more and more rings, a pattern of icons and archetypes emerged. From this patterning, she reads eight different characters with respective traits. Combining lived experience and intuition with structural inheritance from systems like Tarot, Astrology, and the I-Ching, Sheldon created her own divinatory system of cards, chance, and interpretation. Engaging with folks she meets by happenstance, subsequent card readings involve a roll of two eight-sided dice, a coin flip, and what often evolves into an intimate conversation and personal reflection. Is Sheldon a game maker? An unlicensed therapist? Are her card readings performance art or free public programming? She’s cleaning up litter and also engaging strangers in meaningful conversations off-screen. And as impressive, detailed, and in depth as her divinatory world-building is, I also don’t want to undervalue the formalist and material achievements that are the cards and accompanying paintings themselves.
From bright, single-use plastic and metallic packaging, Sheldon stitched together sixty-four cards with enigmatic iconography. They feature patchworks of geometry, critters, plant life, and people, all connecting back to and informing her eight primary archetypes. Sheldon then creates enormous portraits of her card readers amid landscapes and animals that reflect details of their subsequent conversations. In the tapestry-paintings, femme figures look down and hold the gaze of their viewer, their bodies and surroundings composed of found, bought, worn, or gifted textiles that Sheldon further details with paint. The artist describes this reuse process as “embedding traces of daily life into the image itself.” I ask about the backstory of a crow, empty baskets, cicadas, or a mask in a specific painting, and Sheldon is coy. These are symbols particular to a private discussion between two people, two card readers. What she does share is her vast documentation on the archetypes themselves, their respective traits, aesthetics, and capacities. She also points out water marks and printer test strips painted into the work, symbols of visual forces that can both shape and escape our everyday perception. Together, these works comprise her Meridians series, on view at Sibyl Gallery in New Orleans through June 29, 2025.
There are multitudinous avenues into Sheldon’s practice: Is she enamoring you with the rings, these wearable talismans of local detritus and precious metal? Are you enticed by the prospect of a card reading and the intimacy and interior reflection that may follow? Or might she pull you in with the quilted, collaged, and sewn together work of chip bags and bed sheets? Featured in this exhibition is her first work consisting only of paint on canvas — the piece, gathering hour (2024). Her thinned and washy brushstrokes in a limited color palette has me leaning in and staying tuned to how she might further explore this medium in future series. Of her practice in general Sheldon describes “hoarding treasures both worthless and precious, knowing the line between the two is thin.” She makes magic in her ability to transpose the mass-produced and mundane into the beguiling and bespoke. “Sewing is my third arm,” she explains. In this exhibition, she shows us her third eye.
Sadie Sheldon: briefly is on view at Sibyl Gallery in New Orleans through June 30, 2025.
