Sharona Franklin

Sharona Franklin is a Canadian multidisciplinary disabled artist, writer, designer, consultant, and advocate. Deeply invested in bioethics and disability activism, her work explores radical therapies, bio-ritualism, ecology, and social interdependence. Franklin’s practice probes the psychic, social, and biomedical conditions of living with chronic degenerative diseases influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Many of her works draw on vernacular craft traditions and botany while also referencing pharmacology and cybernetic craft, creating tensions between the domestic and the techno-scientific. Franklin’s gelatin sculptures encase syringes, pills, hardware, and medicinal plants and flowers picked by the artist, while her textile works feature images and axioms surrounding discourses of disability, gender, class, and bio-citizenship. Her use of varied organic and pharmaceutical materials connects her extensive research into bioethics and environmental harm with holistic propositions for remediation and care, subverting the domestic alienation of disabled individuals and challenging our ideas surrounding accessibility, ableism, and care.

Sharona Franklin (b. 1987, Vancouver, Canada) lives and works in Merritt, Canada. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), King’s Leap (New York), La Maison de Rendez-Vous (Brussels), and Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal). Recent group exhibitions include the Victoria and Albert Museum (South Kensington), the Audain Art Museum (Whistler), CIVA Museum (Brussels), Remai Modern (Saskatoon), and New Image Art Gallery (Los Angeles), among others. Her work has been published in Artforum, Vogue, Art Basel, and the New York Times.

Born in 1987 in Vancouver, Canada

Lives and works in Merritt, Canada