Sierra Weston (b. 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is an artist working between Montreal and Toronto. Her work explores themes of emotional expression and fragility, moral ambiguity, confinement and protection, and memory through the mediums of sound and songwriting, puppet making, experimental printmaking, and animation.
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. Together they create avant-pop music that weaves experimental recording processes with pop genre songwriting structures. They have opened for Eiko Ishibashi, Jules Reidy, Glissandro 70 and were performers in InterAccess’ 2025 VectorFest. As Sweet Lips, Kurtz and Weston also create multi-media installation work which have shown at the plumb and 24 hr atm lotto in Toronto. They will perform at Send+Receive Experimental Music Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the Fall of 2026 and have an upcoming full album, Sweet Lips Again.
Artist Statement
In a world of fractured perspectives, my work is a response to personal experiences and cultural beliefs of goodness and morality. My belief in the transference of emotion, ideology, and presence into inanimate objects through gesture across time is integral to my practice. Forms are built from intuition and improvisation, and emotions are mediated 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. I frequently look to folk practices as inspiration for my methodologies and approaches.
When creating my paper puppets, I begin with experimental printmaking. These prints are crafted with layered stamps and ink to create colourful landscapes that characters and settings are built from. Each piece acts as a record keeper through gesture, engraved glyph, or collaged self portraiture. My work is driven by a desire to create foils to converse with to better understand the 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.