Sculptor Shray comes to Half Moon Bay

Written by Stacy Trevenon - Half Moon Bay Review

Bronze sculptor Shray says that "My current sculptures begin with the spirit line" and are all about relationships — physical, emotional and spiritual.

Certainly the bronze work of Shray is also about the sensual — smooth, flowing pairs of human figures that seem to flow into one another in warm, sensuous and expressive embraces.

Part Scottish and part Native American, Shray was named for her paternal great-grandmother. The Indian word translates to "rising star" or "morning star, the star that in Plains Indians lore gave birth to the human race.

Born in Virginia, Shray grew up amid an extended family on a Colorado sheep ranch in summer and attended school in San Francisco in wintertime. Throughout her childhood, she was exposed to the work of great painters and sculptors like Rodin or Henry Moore, and studied classical anatomy and color theory at the San Francisco Academy of Art.

She now lives in San Francisco.

Shray describes sculpting as a process of getting to the heart and the real meaning of a piece by setting it free from the beginning when she first touches the clay.

"When my hands touch the clay, they pull it away, exposing the image from within," she wrote in an artist's statement. "Let my sculptures speak to you as they do to me, in a soft whisper as I pass by them, reassuring me that we all have the same beauty within."