Sky Pape attended Queen's University in Canada before moving to New York City, where she studied at Parsons School of Design and The Art Students League of New York.
Pape's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and other public and private collections.
Her awards and honors include significant grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the E.D. Foundation, and residency fellowships at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center and The Bogliasco Foundation's Liguria Study Center for the Arts & Humanities, both in Italy.
Sky Pape's artwork is an intensive examination of traditional drawing materials through unconventional methods. Drawing is the mainstay of her creative practice, using idiosyncratic, process-based techniques that develop from the inherent physical properties of her supplies – familiar materials like handmade paper, ink, graphite, and even water.
Pape relates to the continuity and intrinsic meaning to be found in working with many of the same creative materials that have been essential to our most ancient civilized societies. She is avidly dedicated to the honored cultural traditions related to paper-making and ink, at the same time intrigued by finding ways to expand the vocabulary of drawing as a visual language and challenge the artistic conventions of these materials.
Eschewing brushes, pens, and typical tools, Pape's store of unusual approaches includes drawing with mist, ice, rain, and palm fronds. The act of drawing with water, making marks through the paper and not just upon it, are typical of her practice, allowing the materials themselves to visually convey something of nature’s complex and intense energy.
Pape’s abstract drawings point to what can be found both internally and in nature. Yet, like certainty, any perceived forms therein dissolve upon close scrutiny, the image merely a fleeting figment. Pape says that nature and art give her a perspective, context, and means to grasp otherwise inexpressible sensations and states of being, like fear, beauty, wonderment, and decay, which often coexist in opposition. Since her work is searching, rather than making what she already knows, her discoveries don’t lead to resolution – there’s always more.
Sky Pape has lived most of her life on a small island and expresses a deep respect and fascination for water, an important component of her work. Inwood Hill salt marsh, not far from the artist’s studio in uppermost Manhattan, is a good place to find her, in contemplation of the changing tides. For her, nature is a generous influence, both refuge and resource center.
Sky Pape's artwork has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad. She is represented by June Kelly Gallery in New York and d.e.n. contemporary in Los Angeles.
