Sharon Gottula is an artist based in Kenmore. Sharon serves as the Marketing Director for our local arts affiliate, the Arts of Kenmore. Her work is centered on climate change specifically about how the Monarch migration is being impacted. The install will include a chandelier of Monarch cocoons as well as two large-scale paintings.
The Extinction Chandelier
An Installation by Sharon Gottula at Window Gallery at Shift
Opening November 6, 2025 – First Thursday, Pioneer Square Art Walk
310 S Washington Street, Seattle, WA
SEATTLE, WA — This November, SHIFT Gallery’s Window Gallery will feature The Extinction Chandelier, a new installation by multidisciplinary artist Sharon Gottula, whose work in clay and encaustic wax explores the fragile intersections between nature, time, and human impact. The installation opens November 6, 2025, in conjunction with Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Art Walk.
At once luminous and unsettling, The Extinction Chandelier suspends dozens of sculpted monarch cocoons in a haunting meditation on climate change and loss. The monarch butterfly—one of the most extraordinary migrators on the planet, traveling from the mountains of Mexico to the northern reaches of Canada—serves as the central symbol in Gottula’s work. Once abundant, monarch populations have plummeted in recent decades due to habitat destruction, pesticide use, and the disappearance of milkweed, the only plant their caterpillars can eat.
“This isn’t just a national issue—it’s a global one,” says Gottula. “As the planet warms and the timing of blossoms and migrations shift, species like the monarch find themselves out of sync with their own survival. The chandelier form felt like a fitting metaphor—a thing of beauty, light, and fragility, hanging by a thread.”
Constructed from wax, clay, and cast forms, the installation merges painting and sculpture in Gottula’s signature blend of delicacy and structure. Alongside the chandelier, encaustic and acrylic paintings speak to climate change, migration, and extinction—inviting viewers to consider the interconnectedness of all living systems and the urgency of environmental change.
The Window Gallery at SHIFT has for many years and in several iterations served as an unexpected, unexplained, mid-block art enclave in Seattle’s art-gallery-filled Tashiro-Kaplan Building in the downtown core. The window has been used for exhibiting both large and small installations of artists’ work within a limited space. The range, size, and unique assemblages of art shown in the window have and continue to surprise and delight passersby along Washington Street between Third and Second Avenues.
Based in Kenmore, Washington, Sharon Gottula works primarily in encaustic painting and sculptural installation. Her art often draws on natural motifs—trees, cocoons, and atmospheric light—to explore the rhythms of nature and humanity’s impact on the environment.
The Extinction Chandelier will be on view November 6 through December 1, 2025, in SHIFT Gallery’s Window Gallery, visible 24/7 from the street. The public is invited to the opening during the First Thursday Art Walk on November 6.
For more information and images, visit>>www.sharongottula.com.
Window Gallery at Shift>>https://thewindowgalleryatshift.com/
