Full CV
Nora Shields works across painting, sculpture, and installation, producing sculptural reliefs that explore the interplay between industrial materials and decorative forms. Using metal, fabric, embroidery, and automotive paint, she creates compositions that range from restrained monochromes to vividly colored surfaces, incorporating found pattern and texture. Circular and folded forms emerge as distinct but related structures within the work. Rooted in her physical process of folding and unfolding, her works register both as objects and as shifting visual experiences. Drawing on her background in theater and interiors, she develops a formal language that merges structural clarity with ornamental excess. Fringe and ribbon, in dialogue with paint and metal, establish a dynamic tension between the playful and the utilitarian, the hard and the soft.

Framed as a poetic staging of simultaneity, her work unfolds through shifts in form and vantage, with elements revealed obliquely as the viewer moves around them. She uses draping and pattern alongside architectural motifs—walls, arches, seating—extending her interest in spatial perception. Her forms often carry allusive references to feminine or symbolic objects—portals, dream catchers, fans, bows, wrapping, sashes, shields, embroidery—remaining open and associative. Willingly embracing both the baroque and the minimal, her works are often spare in form yet activated by bold color, yielding a visual intensity and vitality that is at once poetic and sensual.

Nora Shields was born in Pittsburgh, PA and lives in Los Angeles, CA. She received a Master of Fine Art from Art Center College Of Design, Pasadena, CA in 2010 and a Bachelor of Arts from University Of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand in 1998. Shields’ has had solo exhibitions at The Pit gallery in Los Angeles in 2016, 2019 and 2022.  Her work was featured in Truth Syrup, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA (2016) and has been included in artist-driven projects such as Garden, Ladies Room LA, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Waves, Ladies Room LA, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Electric Banquet, Southfield, Detroit, MI (2018); Re-Planetizer, Regina Rex, New York, NY (2016); Total Work, Elder House, Los Angeles, CA (2015); Interstice, Project Art Space, New York, NY (2014); and The Birthing Valley of the Blood Poppies, Actual Size, Los Angeles, CA (2011).