Sheila Ghidini's work encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation and site-specific public art. Her work has been shown and collected in private and public collections including The Achenbach Collection of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Runneymede Farm Sculpture Park in Woodside, CA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the city of San Francisco. She attended Hartford Art School, University of Hartford and did graduate work at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She completed an M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving the Sylvan and Pam Coleman Memorial Fellowship. She was an artist-in residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts and The American Academy in Rome summer program. She has received grants from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, the Krasner-Pollack Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Marcelle Labaudt Memorial Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her public projects engage communities, architecture and the landscape. She has created public gathering spaces in San Jose, Campbell and Emeryville, CA. Sheila collaboratively designed two MUNI Transit shelter on 19th Ave., in San Francisco and one shelter in Lodi, CA. Sheila has taught art in schools throughout the Bay Area, including San Francisco State University, University of California Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts. She currently teaches Drawing at UC Berkeley Extensions.

My work is site specific, responding to circumstances and formal aspects of particular places. I have used the chair form as mini architecture, both 2-dimensionally and 3-dimensionally. The chair can be seen as a locator in space, a symbol of both presence and absence, and a fundamental structural architectural form. I'm interested in calling attention to the ubiquitous, but often overlooked spaces between things as well as the shadows cast by them. This interest developed from years of observational drawing, both that of my own and of the students that I teach. Rendering is a skill which requires close examination of the relationships between objects and space. Negative spaces and cast shadows might be considered to be empty or as absence, but I perceive them as full and rich with nuance. Coupled with this drawing interest, I'm compelled to make objects. The quotidian forms of chairs and domestic furniture have served as my material, and along with my own inventions, reveal themselves to be both vulnerable and structural. Illusionary shadows made in graphite and chalk play against those that are real. What's missing, obscured, or lost is as critical to the work, if not more so, than that which is tangibly present.