Pam-bitious work

Pamela Sheridan is a Malden native, emerging artist and cancer survivor.

But don’t make the mistake of calling her an artist whose work is all about cancer.

The Montserrat College of Art alumna, who has also lived in New Hampshire, Melrose and Wakefield, calls herself a “conceptual sculptor” whose work has evolved since the health scare that loosened up her style a bit.

“I was very representative, actually, for a very long time. Which means portraits and stuff that looks like what you see,” she said in an interview over coffee this summer, coming off the heels of her latest Malden display at artSPACE@16 on Princeton Road. “Then I was diagnosed, unfortunately, with cancer. But that’s not what my work is all about. There are a lot of people whose illness becomes their identity. For me, it was a catalyst.”

She said she spent college “stubbornly” opposed to abstract creations. Then, after getting the bad news about cancer, she had what she calls a “f—k it moment.”

“Your eyes are opened. You look at what matters,” she said. “You look at what you’re caught up in that you shouldn’t be. I realized that emotions are abstract, and I’m always trying to show emotions.”

She said she stopped focusing on whether people were understanding the intent of her art. It freed her, she said, to reach a different place in how she creates and approaches her work.

“There’s good and bad going on in life at the same time. Life situations are also abstract,” she said. “A lot of people focus on the negative. I choose to focus on the positive. The negative is where you learn most of your life. Cancer is a negative, but I turned it into a positive.”

The most recent works she displayed in Malden were sculptures rendered in twine, barbed wire and other coarse materials whose meaning and interpretation was left open to viewers. One was purposely hung from the gallery’s ceiling, high over viewers’ heads, so that “the more you look, the more you see,” she said. “I do that on purpose.”

Sheridan said the responses people gave her at gallery shows have “heightened her trust” in the public as they view art.

“People get it 99 percent of the time. One person said it was very humbling,” she said. “I put little beads in it, and yet the pessimists will focus on the barbed wire. They tell me what it represents to them. The positive people don’t even notice the barbed wire is there. They find it very hopeful.”

She said her work can, at times, be all consuming — to the point where it borders on fixation. Each piece takes hours over days and months; one particular work, which she said reflected “a relationship that wasn’t going well,” became “very time consuming and very obsessive. It was so much like that relationship.”

She said people who view her art often comment on the length of time each piece evidently takes to create.

“My last sculpture took me four months,” she said. “Some days were 12 or 14 hour days. That kind of process is how I’ve always done stuff, even if I was painting. It becomes very meditative.”

She has a studio in her home, and also works as a personal trainer. She is a self-described “avid runner” who is just breaking into the local art scene, and finding it thriving. She hopes to eventually relocate to New York, and is building a portfolio of digital images on slides now to prepare.

“I really like how I’m working right now. I may dive back into the representative, but it’s so restrictive,” she said. “I always try to buy new materials (for sculpting). Home Depot is my favorite place in the world. I get my ideas as I walk around.”

Duct tape, drainpipes, twine, jute and “stuff I don’t even know what it is” — they all could find a home in her next project. She said the urge to create out of innocuous everyday objects comes very naturally.

“I used to fight that urge, and I didn’t know why. Sometimes it’s just the texture I like, or how something feels,” she said. “I even see things walking on the streets. That’s a big artists’ thing, picking through trash.”

But no matter how she comes across her next project — and whether she stays abstract or returns to the literal — she’ll always struggle with the illness that stopped her life in its tracks and forced her to reassess her work.

“I still have it,” she said, explaining that her cancer originally showed up as a nodule on her thyroid. “The doctor didn’t get a biopsy, I waited a few years, and it spread. It just stops you. You go through your struggle with that. My doctor told me to start thinking day by day.”

Since then, as an ever-present reminder to slow down, the growth has forced her not to get “wrapped up in worry.” She said it has also helped her to live “more in the moment.”

“For me, it made me choose different people in my life,” she said. “You find out who is there, and who isn’t. But if I sit here and worry about cancer, it wouldn’t do anything. If I sit there and worry about my art, it’ll never get made. So I’m still living with it.”

Meanwhile, she’s building a Web site, and launching an art career. Sand T, of artSPACE@16gallery, has said Sheridan is one of the area’s top emerging artists.

Until she makes it big, she said she’s appreciative of Malden’s nurturing artist scene, and hopes to see it grow in the future — even if she moves on.

“The great thing about art is that it calms the mind,” she said. “When you see communities like Malden, it’s a good sign.”