Sierra Weston (b. 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is a Toronto and Montréal based artist whose work across mediums explores themes of emotional expression and fragility, moral ambiguity, and memory.
Weston spent her adolescence in the California Bay Area, where she grew up doing both visual and performing arts. She earned a BA in Design and Art History at the University of California, Davis (2020) and an MA in Art History from the University of Toronto (2022).
In 2023 she was the Artist-in-Residence at PIX Film Gallery, Toronto, Ontario. In 2026 she was in the Video Artist-in-Residence at Struts Gallery, Sackville, New Brunswick. She has shown at the Durham Creative Arts Centre and PIX Film Gallery. She has written for Inter-Access Gallery, and published work with Necktie Art Journal and Intaglio Art Journal.
A significant collaboration in Weston’s art practice is the work made alongside Owen Kurtz as Sweet Lips. They create avant-pop music that brings together experimental recording processes and pop genre songwriting structures. They have opened for Eiko Ishibashi, Jules Reidy, and were performers in InterAccess’ 2025 VectorFest. As Sweet Lips, Kurtz and Weston also create multi-media installation work which has shown at the plumb and 24 hr atm lotto.
Artist Statement
In a world of fractured perspectives, my work is an expressive and raw response to personal experiences and lived realities. I create varied work that believes in the leakage of emotion and ideology into material, built from a world of intuition and improvisation. Emotions are mediated through self reflection and stored in materials through handmade processes. I am inspired by memory and my work is driven by the tensions between personal perspective and varied historical frameworks.
When creating my paper puppets, I work intuitively and build from initial sketches rooted in a love for all that is cartoonish and twee. I also create the prints that are used to make my characters and settings. These are crafted with stamps and ink and create colourful landscapes that are densely textured and expressive. Each piece, anthropomorphic or indexical, holds a record of emotion through gesture, engraved glyph, or collaged self portraiture. My work is driven by a deep desire to create foils and mirrors to converse with as a means of better understanding the fragmented and disjointed realities of being human. The world I craft is one of subtle magic and mysticism, borrowing from from objects of daily life and animals of metaphor like crickets and spiders.
Both emotionally vulnerable and hyperbolically humorous, my paper puppets are mischievous and they enjoy being creatures of moral ambiguity. They become containers and independent actors stemming from heightened emotions. Dichotomies such as right and wrong, true and false, punishment and forgiveness, all provide dense spectrums that my work can heartily bounce along. I animate them through video techniques, primarily stop-motion animation, which enables me to further explore their roots in fable and moral story-telling.