Heidi Lau: Ouroboros
Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
October 30–December 19, 2026
Images courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
Press Release – Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present Ouroboros, an installation of ceramic sculptural work by artist Heidi Lau. On view from October 30 through December 19, 2026, Ouroboros expands upon Pavilion Procession, a major installation by Lau shown in the Sigg Prize 2025 Exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong. A public opening will be held on Friday, October 30, from 6- 8 p.m. The artist will be present.
The title of the exhibition, Ouroboros, refers to an ancient totem of a snake or dragon in a circular formation swallowing its own tail. Interpreted as a reference to the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, for Lau it also points to a blurred distinction between phenomena and beings.
Through hand-built, textured ceramics, Heidi Lau creates ritual objects, funerary monuments, fossilized creatures, and miniature universes. Since 2021, Lau has been immersed in the zoomorphic imaginings of Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), a text compiling hundreds of geographies and fantastical creatures dated as early as fourth century BCE. The source mythologies of these cross-pollinated species, transmutable beings, and androgynous beasts inform Lau’s sculptural conceptions of a cosmic space, interweaving anti-colonial, anti-categorical, non-linear thinking with personal histories and narratives.
Presented in the main gallery space is Within These Very Mountains (2026), the largest ceramic installation Lau has made since she began experimenting with the suspended form in 2021 as the inaugural artist in residence at Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The elements and colors of this multi-part, immersive work came to Lau in a recurring dream – a floating landscape rendered in clay. Glazed in celadon greens, pastel pinks, and celestial blues, these craggy, bodily vessels evoke grottoes, scholar’s rocks, and stalactites. For Lau, the depiction of a landscape (shanshui) not only expresses dimensions of the self, but is also a host for historical discourse with the past. Lau’s composite terrain implies a connection between the corporeal and earthly, the mythical and sublime.
In Kinetic Being (A Walk Around the Sandstone Pavilions), 2025, Lau incorporates a technological element in her work for the first time. As a continuation of her research into the Shanhaijing text, Lau has created her own mytho-robotic creature: a ceramic, kinetic spider which meanders around a hand-built landscape. Part organic and part machine, Lau’s spider is twitchy and sporadic in its movement, and speaks to the paradoxical nature of Lau’s work.
The works in Ouroboros defy categorization and exist in a perpetual, contradictory state of productive/anti-productive, ancient/futuristic, made/unmade, and even beautiful/grotesque. These dichotomies underscore an irrationality central to Lau’s practice and work.
Heidi Lau (born 1987) grew up in Macau and lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two person exhibitions include Chrysalis Spectre, with Leelee Chan, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2024); A Cacophony of Rocks, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2024); Shadow Speak, with Biraaj Dodiya, Bureau, New York (2023); Gardens as Cosmic Terrains, Green-Wood Cemetery, New York (2022); Spirit Vessels, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); The Primordial Molder, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017); and The Obscure Region II, Macau Art Museum, Macau (2014), among others. In 2019, Lau presented Apparition for the Macau-China Collateral Exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Recent group exhibitions include Sigg Prize 2025 Exhibition at M+ Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2025); The Jealous Potter at UCCA Clay, Yixing (2025); Shanshui: Echoes and Signals at M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Cosmos Cinema: The 14th Shanghai Biennale at Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2023); and Liquid Ground at UCCA, Beijing (2022) and Para Site, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong (2021), among others.
In 2026, Lau was one of two recipients of the Sigg Prize 2025 by M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong.
Lau’s work is included in the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York; Kadist Art Foundation; the M+ Museum in Hong Kong; Macau Museum of Art, Macau; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York Historical, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others.
Erin Shirreff: New Work
Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
October 30–December 19, 2026
Images courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
Press Release – Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present Erin Shirreff: New Work, a solo exhibition of new photographic works in the back galleries, on view from October 30 to December 19, 2026.
Erin Shirreff’s new body of work continues her thinking through object-image translation and how a sense of materiality—our experience of an object—is lost or gained through image. These new cyanotypes and print collages both inspire and rework Shirreff’s sculptural practice. Her collaged prints reimagine her previous sculpture as intangible forms—dissecting and rebuilding them anew—while her cyanotypes inspire new Corten steel sculptures.
Included in the exhibition is a series of collaged archival pigment prints titled Ctlg. Constructed of layered photographs of cast components of her own earlier sculptural work, Shirreff creates new, imagined sculptures. Each photograph acts as a building block, simultaneously adding a component to the image and obfuscating the elements underneath. Through layering, Shirreff builds out shapes that can defy and stretch the physical limits that constrain three-dimensional objects. Initially the forms’ structure is plausible, but closer inspection reveals its impossibility—playfully jutting out, folding in on itself, and extending beyond the restrictions of gravity. Shirreff’s assembled sculptures appear both weightless and unmoored, floating on a pale blue background, and solidly grounded.
New Work also includes a selection of cyanotype photograms, toned to shades of brown, dusty purple, pink, and muted blue. The photograms bear traces of vague, shadowy forms: undulating curves swoop over distinct, sharp lines and dark jagged shadows contrast the bright white of paper untouched by light. Here as in the other works on view, Shirreff creates a kind of two-dimensional sculpture on paper, retaining the depth of an object within the confines of a singular plane.
Erin Shirreff (born 1975) lives and works in Montréal. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wis. (2025); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2024); the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2021–22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015). A monograph chronicling twenty years of her photography, sculpture, and video work was published this year by Gregory R. Miller & Co.
Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. Shirreff earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2005.