Heaps Estrin's Blog

The Lobby | Elemental Metaphors

Sandy Middleton’s show at The Lobby draws from the elements of sky, water and land to tell a story of personal and global transformation.  

Words by Marilisa Racco

“An artist’s journey is never a straight line,” says Sandy Middleton, a St. Catharines-based artist who uses her technical training in photography to create an inventive medium she calls photo encaustic paper sculpture, which will be on display at The Lobby by Heaps Estrin through the fall.

The medium came to her when, during the pandemic, she was cleaning out her basement and came upon 30 years’ worth of photography, prompting her to think about what she could do with it. It began by cutting up the photographs, painting over them with encaustic wax—a technique where melted beeswax and pigment are used as paint—and layering them. 

“I liked the idea, but I wasn’t getting the result I really wanted,” she says. “That’s when I started exploring with [printing on] fine Japanese paper like kozo and washi to get the transparency I wanted. That’s how the idea was born.” 

Homebound and eager to continue working with this new medium, Middleton turned her gaze skyward and started photographing clouds. “I let the clouds come to me, and I created a big database of cloud imagery that I started to cut up,” she says. Through painting and layering the photographs, she came up with a metaphor for how the global pandemic had changed everything. “Our world was different, and I was picking up the pieces and trying to put them together. They’re fragmented photographs, and they no longer look how they originally did, much like ourselves.” 

As travel restrictions lifted, Middleton went further afield to Newfoundland and various parks in Ontario, where she photographed water and was hit with another metaphor: “It was about us trying to go back to ground. We were trying to find our stability with everything going on in the world.” Her next thesis was the solar eclipse, and her newest work focuses on rocks. 

All these elements—sky, water, land—feature in her show at The Lobby and represent what she’s worked through personally and professionally since creating her new niche. The pieces are ethereal and sometimes moody, and the repetitive layers of printed paper evoke the softness of a textile, creating a sculptural, three-dimensional effect.  

Middleton always strives to reach new audiences with her work, and when a gallery owner gravitates to it, she knows that their patrons will, too. 

“My work is very architectural and isn’t as easy to live with as a painted landscape,” she says. “I need a unique audience that likes to be challenged with their understanding of what art should be. And I think the audience at The Lobby has that sensibility.”