Her text-based works examine how meaning shifts across different contexts. Basic words can carry multiple interpretations depending on personal experience, cultural background, or situational framing. Everyday expressions often extend beyond their literal definitions, while slogans, through repetition and simplification, lose specificity and become reduced to connotation. She works with materials such as silicone, cement, and fluorescent acrylic to create distorted forms of words, pushing text toward the edge of illegibility and questioning its stability. Influenced by Renée Green’s idea of locating meaning through absence, she is currently working with materials in fragments to construct a developing visual language that reflects processes of continual formation and transformation. Using materials including wood, glass, sand, and silicone, her works show how materials influence each other by highlighting the gaps, joins, overlaps, and disconnections.
Shiyao received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2018. She participated in the artist residency at the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation and the 2023-2024 RBC Emerging Visual Artists Program at Arts Commons. She is a recipient of Alberta Foundation of the Art’s Visual Arts and New Media Individual Project, and Ernestine Betsberg and Arthur Osver Scholarship.