Biography

Shelagh Howard (Canadian, b. 1971) is a photo-based visual artist and member of the 2SLGBTQI+ community based in Halifax, Mi’kma’ki, Canada.  Her practice examines the layered terrain of memory, identity, and embodied experience. Through long exposures and the human figure, she explores the construction of selfhood—interrogating themes of gender, generational trauma, intimacy, and isolation.

Shelagh studied psychology at The University of Toronto and photography at Ryerson University, and has created and exhibited works in Canada, the US and Europe. Her portraits have been published in Songlines Magazine UK, Opera Canada, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, VICE magazine, on billboards in Times Square, NYC and Dundas Square, Toronto. Her personal work received an honourable mention at the 14th and 26th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Barcelona, Spain, and the 2021 Artist Award from the Cornell Henry Art Gallery in San Diego, and was a Top 200 Finalist in PhotoLucida Critical Mass in 2025.

Artist Statement

“We’ve all got an identity. You can’t avoid it.  It’s what’s left when you take everything else away.”  Diane Arbus

My work begins at the intersection of physicality, memory, and selfhood - exploring who we are vs how we are perceived, by others and also by ourselves. It took me decades to understand that the way I moved through the world was entirely a composite of the expectations of others and of the society that I lived in. That I masked so convincingly that the facade was not only what I showed others, but that I wore it like a second skin: a construct created to conform, to please, to stay safe, to belong. And yet I never really belonged. I was not always safe.   

In the early years of my practice, I chased images that I could see in my minds eye, but for which I had no explanation. Slowly I realized that they were more autobiographical than I’d realized, with long exposures capturing overlapping layers and bodies escaping their outlines: a self uncontainable, naked, and vulnerable - a series of visual revelations that briefly unmask what lingers behind our carefully constructed facades.

The body is central to my practice. The images move between intimacy and distance, where gestures, traces, and absences evoke memory, longing, and the quiet persistence of self.