Paige Harris is a full-time artist and crafter currently working out of her home studio in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Alberta. In 2017, Paige earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts with a major in sculpture from the Alberta College of Art + Design. Upon graduating, Harris worked in a prop-making studio for three and a half years as a sculptor, welder, painter, and hard-coater, resigning in 2021 to pursue her artistic practice and the entrepreneurship of her pottery business, branded SunDay Ceramics. Within her business, Paige produces, markets, and sells colourful pottery, jewelry, and small sculptures exploring themes of nature, nostalgia, and growth.

While Paige’s pottery production is visually playful and innocent, her artistic practice takes on visceral subject matter, comparing and correlating suffering to the human experience. Harris’s work begs to answer the question: Can there be beauty in suffering? Rather than submitting to the habitual response of running from pain and struggle, Paige attempts to magnify and cradle it, to place pain high on a pedestal and honour it for how it strengthens us.

While sculpture and ceramics have been a major focus within her practice, Paige has a diverse skill set in photography, mixed media, and painting. She’s familiar with painting in 2D and 3D using acrylic, oil, spray paint, spray gun, and airbrushing techniques on large and small scales, with both exterior and interior painting techniques.

Paige is also an advocate for public art and collaboration, with a distinguished public art portfolio. She has assisted in painting three public art murals in Mohkinstsis/Calgary and has most recently participated in a public art residency in collaboration with Gladzy Kei to design and produce signage for the cSPACE Eau Clair Community Hub in November 2022.

Harris encourages her audience to view their work through the lens of their perspectives, producing questions about the human experience. Paige intends to reduce the humiliation of trauma and mental illness and encourage people to be vulnerable, compassionate, and courageous in their suffering: “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer” (Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl).