Name pronunciation? This way
We’ve heard Sheriff, Shirrff, Shirreff, but the surname is actually pronounced Sheriff!

Across Canada, across borders
Born in 1975 in British Columbia, Canada, the artist lived for almost two decades in New York and moved to Montreal in 2019.
The wild landscape of the area where she grew up has influenced some of her works, such as the film Lake (2012). Taken from a 1980s tourist catalogue about British Columbia, the work shows a photograph of a lake surrounded by stark pine trees. Slowly, the image becomes brighter, areas darken, are illuminated again, and the picture before our eyes is gradually explored. 

Translation is the key maneuver in Erin Shirreff's work
Her work oscillates between different media, challenging the medium of sculpture that can be translated into photography, film, and back to sculpture again.  

Exploring the main forms of mid-twentieth-century sculpture and how we encounter them
Clear lines and strict forms are prevalent in the sculptures from this particular period. However, because of their fixed location, size, or material, photography often becomes the only means for a wider audience to appreciate them. However, a photograph cannot capture the original spatial experience of a sculpture, its surroundings, or the immediate impression it creates on the viewer. It is this intermediate moment—what Shirreff refers to as the “space of not knowing”—that inspires the artist.

Scale and the sense of time passing are of importance
This is especially tangible in Shirreff’s video works. There is no beginning and no end, the viewer can join and watch at any given moment, losing track of time and space in which they move. The videos, screened onto walls or large monitors, loop infinitely, thus engulfing the viewer.

There is No Shadow without Light
Throughout her work, Shirreff consistently explores the interplay of light and shadow. Her cyanotypes, a direct and original method of photography, harness the essence of light on a light sensitive surface. The Drop sculptures also exemplify this theme, where stacked corten steel sheets create captivating shadows in the layers and walls behind them. And naturally, every photograph and video is a testament to the transformative power of light.

Erin Shireff explores the elusive “aura” of works by artists such as Medardo Rosso, Donald Judd, or Tony Smith
The recent traveling exhibition Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture, held at mumok Vienna and Kunstmuseum Basel featured Shirreff's work Medardo Rosso, Madame X, 1896. Shirreff created her 24-minute silent film from 2013 by manipulating copies of an image of a sculpture by Rosso, then assembling them digitally in an entrancing alchemy of light and shape. Like Shirreff, Rosso was also deeply interested in exploring the boundaries of photography in relation to sculpture, as the museum's website explains:

„Unusually for his time, Rosso made photography central to his sculptural process. (…) Cropped and collaged, his curious, often tiny images attest to experimental interventions inside and outside the darkroom. From 1900 onward, Rosso used photography not just to stage his sculptures but also to test how angles, lighting, and framing altered perception. He adjusted the casts accordingly, then photographed the new results. In his hands, photography thus became both a record of and a catalyst for transformation.“

Going from the materiality of a three-dimensional surface to its reproduction on a two-dimensional book page and vice versa
Works like Paper sculpture (2024) and *Table Muse *(2025) examine the tension between surface and spatiality, as well as the relationship between individual parts and the absent whole. Shirreff uses image fragments from sculptures published in the last 80 years, digitizing and enlarging them before printing onto aluminum sheets. These thin metal images are then cut into shapes and layered into deep-set frames as sculptural collages. In this way, the once three-dimensional artwork takes on a new dimension—emerging from flatness and transcending it again.

Our favourite quote: „Erin uses art as subject matter because art is an object of contemplation and my subject is contemplation.“(1)
**… **As a friend of the artist once observed about her work. There is rarely another occasion in our daily life where we stand still to just look at something, except when we engage with art. Using art as a theme in her work is therefore a kind of continuation of an urge for quiet reflection. Shirreff further explains: „People complain about museums and galleries all the time, that they are elite spaces, et cetera, but the number of spaces in which the public is allowed to think without a script at this point is vanishing. I have always found those experiences, those spaces, very meaningful.“ (2)