Shelby Baldridge
Missoula, MT
Exhibit Year: 2023-2024
About the Artist
Shelby Baldridge is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Missoula, Montana. She works in sculpture, drawing and painting, and received an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2020. Regardless of the medium, Shelby’s work centers around the natural world and scientific themes like biological evolution, ecological cycles and the connections between species. Her sculptural work also considers materiality and incorporates mass manufactured materials such as PVC plumbing and repurposed fabric to highlight the binary between her natural subject matter and the waste of mass production and single use products. Growing up in Montana allowed for ample access to the outdoors and encouraged a curiosity for natural sciences like botany and ecology at a young age. Shelby recently started teaching a Drawing foundations course at the University of Montana as an adjunct instructor. She is thrilled to reconnect to Missoula art community and University where she originally studied art and received her BFA in painting in 2012.
Shelby Baldridge is an MT Open AIR artist.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice draws from my curiosity for the nonhuman world, particularly the connections between disparate things, both animate and inanimate. I am inspired by chance encounters while exploring in nature, such as finding vibrant fungi sprouting from a fallen tree, or sea creatures in a tide pool. I aim to replicate aspects of these experiences in the studio by fragmenting imagery from these moments and connecting them to one another in a composition or juxtaposing synthetic materials with organic forms in sculpture. I utilize a wide range of materials in sculpture that are mainly sourced from collected everyday items like secondhand clothing, scrap leather and cleaning utensils. These objects then undergo a degree of transformation in the process of becoming surface texture and color on a piece. Whether painting or working 3D, I seek to synthesize and integrate seemingly unrelated aspects of the nonhuman world as a way of portraying the interconnectedness of matter on earth.