Savannah Sibson is a Visual Arts and Education student attending the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada on the unceded lands of the Lək'ʷəŋən People. She grew up in North Vancouver, Canada and completed the International Baccalaureate Certificate program in Visual Arts and English Language and Literature at Carson Graham Secondary School. She then attended the University of Victoria, projected to receive a bachelor of Visual Arts and a minor in Art Education in April 2026. This is where she first received formal training which resulted in developing skills within her main focus in painting and conceptual art.
I’ve been met with niceties and pleasantries all my life. My favourite greeting by far will always be confusion followed by intrigue coupled with thinly vailed disgust. These reactions feed the most exciting conversations. My practice is based in painting and conceptual work, including artist multiples, installations, and performances. Between these two ways of making my practice is unified through subject matter. I work with materials that allow for physicality and confrontation, often centring around the body as a site of fascination. Themes of abjection, resistance to enforced social customs, private verses public dynamics, and inherited histories run throughout my work. I am drawn to what is intimate, uncomfortable, desirable, and bizarre, using material and form to explore how bodies are shaped, controlled, and used as social disobedience. My painting practice focuses on the study of texture, particularly flesh, bone, stretch, and wrinkle. I am interested in the taboo surrounding nudity and how the body is framed and consumed. These works tend to be reflective and introspective, engaging with the idea of exposure and physical tension. Recently, I have been incorporating elements of my Norwegian heritage through traditional Rosemaling patterns, allowing my personal and cultural history to surface within practice. My conceptual work leans toward disruption. I enjoy testing the limits of comfort and inserting disturbance into controlled spaces. These works operate at the threshold between beauty and grotesque, where attraction and repulsion coexist. Having experienced environments rooted in conformity, I use conceptual art as a way to gratify impulses toward interrupting expectations. As an artist, I use my practice as a space for vulnerability without requiring my own physical presence. I value the freedom I have to make work that is strange and present it while deciding if it is necessary for the artist to show face. My work allows me to experiment, and to let ideas exist on their own terms. It is where my mind can wander and misbehave reflectively.
