ABOUT

Karey Shinn (née Asselstine) was born in Winnipeg in 1952 and has pursued parallel careers in art, costume and fashion design, and environmental activism.

 

She has chaired and participated in numerous Toronto-based environmental committees, organizations and environmental assessment steering committees, most notably in 1992-95 when she initiated Toronto’s first Water Efficiency Plan, recovering built infrastructure capacity worth $250 million by preventing unnecessary expansion of the landmark Harris Filtration Plant in the Beach neighbourhood. As founding Co-Chair of the Public Committee for Safe Sewage Treatment in Metropolitan Toronto, she participated in the Full Environmental Assessment of the Ashridges Bay Sewage Plant from 1991 to 2011, working alongside Julia Langer of the World Wildlife Fund, Metro Toronto Works Committee engineers and the Department of Health to put in place a stringent Sewer Use By-Law that removed over 80% of the mercury, other heavy metals and gender altering chemicals, from entering the water supply in Lake Ontario.

Her costume designs have graced many a Canadian and American show in film, TV and theatre, and her environmentally-themed fashion shows Too Hot Too Wet Too Dangerous (2009), In Bitu: Evening on the Athabasca (2010) and Cosmetic Green (2012) astonished audiences at F.A.T.—Toronto Alternative Art and Fashion Week—as performance art choreographed for the runway and modelled by professional dancers to original electronic music.

Shinn received a BA in Fine Art (Leeds, Yorksire, 1976), and an MFA from Ruskin University in East Anglia, England, 2005. Her art has been exhibited in Europe, Canada and the US. She began work on Portraits: Icons of Thrift during the pandemic, using the world of 12-inch dolls as a focus that synergizes the main themes of her life: making art, making clothes, and caring for the environment.