Never Too Late Written by: Stephanie Dawson
It’s never too late to make changes and take a chance on a new career. Just ask former physiotherapist turned award winning artist Sherlin Hendrick whose successful showing at Nelson B.C.’s Craft Connections is up until the beginning of May.
Combining unusual materials and using multicultural/multiracial imagery in her sculptures is Sherlin’s specialty. For example feathers and coral become hair, and antique Chinese silver hair ornaments become part of a sculpture’s environment. For her new show, Sherlin has explored a new motif, creating fantastical animals made out of clay and colourful raku holy figures expressing personality and spirit. For more information on her process email sherlinhendrick@hotmail.com.
Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Sherlin has spent 10 years in Manhattan New York where she has received numerous prestigious art honours. Sherlin entered the art world at the age of 39 instead of an earlier age because she says, “growing up in the 50s you thought about making a living – not becoming an artist.”
Growing up in a working class family led her at first to attend school to be a secretary, then later to attend college to be a physiotherapist. Throughout this time, Sherlin says she was always inclined toward art showing talent at a young age.
“When I was 13, I took an eighth grade art class and sculpted a head of one of the boys in my class. I knew then that I could do sculpture. It wasn’t until age 39 that I saw an advertisement for this art process class and decided to take it. I realized then how much I could do in sculpture. It surprised me what I could do without training. After doing the process class, I wanted to get real training.”
The real training came when Sherlin decided to apply for the Master’s program in sculpture at the New York Academy of Art, got accepted, left her physiotherapist practice and finished school in 1997.
“The painful part is that after my first solo show in a New York City gallery, I was getting this attention but I didn’t have enough money to do my art and pay my living expenses. I had to go back and do physiotherapy work which didn’t leave enough time or energy to do my artwork,” she recalls.
Leaving the big city behind for a more inexpensive friendly artistic community, the last three years have been spent in Nelson with her husband David whom she met at a meditation retreat in New York in 2002.
The good news is that since moving to Nelson in 2005, the opportunity to concentrate exclusively on her artwork has finally arrived. Sherlin has embraced this chance, being very prolific, proving it is never too late to follow your artistic path.