IDEET SHARON || A Vancouver Artist Builds Tactile Abstract Art Like Architecture
Ideet Sharon spent years shaping imaginary spaces on a screen as a computer graphics artist and animator, and today the Vancouver artist shapes them by hand in plaster, clay and found materials.
Sharon graduated from a fine arts high school in 1997, studied at Vancouver Film School, and built a long career in the animation industry. A local arts festival pulled her back toward paint and canvas, and conversations she later had with visitors at the festivals where she exhibited led her to become certified as an Expressive Arts Therapist in 2020. In September, she brought her East Vancouver studio practice to Interior Design Show Vancouver, held September 24 to 27 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
Ideet Sharon’s sculptural wall art begins as a sketch, a noodle in her words, which she refines on an iPad and builds in a 3D modelling space. She then 3D prints the small component pieces, assembles them into a composition, and covers the result in plaster and clay paint. The workflow carries her digital background into a physical result.
Through the arch, a long relief of grids, arcs and stepped towers recalls a city skyline rendered in earth tones.
The finish is Roman clay, a material normally used on interior walls. Sharon found it at Greenworks, a paint and building materials shop around the corner from her East Vancouver studio, and knew at once she would use it. The product comes from Portola Paints of Los Angeles, which exhibited at the same show. As she describes it, the clay paints on, then dries hard and durable, with a surface that recalls the desert architecture of Palm Springs and Albuquerque.
The forms trace back to a childhood ambition. Sharon dreamed of becoming an architect, designing playful spaces from simple shapes, and her reliefs and sculptures still read as small buildings, with stairs arriving from different angles, nooks to settle into and more than one way to reach a place. Her artist statement describes the world as a collection of fragments, people, stories and moments, each able to stand alone while contributing to a larger whole. Geometry gives those fragments their structure.
Her wall pieces extend that thinking through layering. Clay sits alongside wood, paper, wallpaper and other found materials, and she builds texture with paint as well. From a distance, the surfaces hold together in a single tonal field. Up close, each layer asks for attention.
'Polyphony Part 1', 2026. 60 x 40 inches. Mixed media collage on canvas.
'Polyphony Part 2', 2026. 60 x 40 inches.. Mixed media collage on canvas.
Tactility is the point. Sharon notes that so much of what we see now is digital and two-dimensional, which makes a natural, touchable surface feel like something people may need more of. The sculptures remove colour altogether, leaving form, shadow and angle to carry the composition.
The work is already moving into architectural settings. Sharon collaborates with art consultants and curators who bridge artists and developers, and a four-by-four-foot wall piece is bound for a development lobby in October. She also works with designers on presentation centers, and two wall pieces on view at the show had already sold, finished only the week before. Her longer ambition is a large public sculpture that people can sit on and climb.
Her work suggests that every well-designed space should have pieces that encourage engagement and touch.
Photography by Florence Leung
