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 language, 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 exploring gaps, joins, overlaps, and disconnections using materials including wood, glass, sand, and silicone. By working with these materials in fragments, she constructs a developing visual language that reflects processes of continual formation and transformation.
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.