Molly Sturge (b. 2002) is a Canadian artist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University in Montreal, where she has lived for the past five years. She is currently based in Berlin. Molly’s practice engages painting as a historically charged medium to explore symbols, memory, and the layered visual language of personal and cultural associations. Drawing on historical imagery, religious iconography, and everyday objects—often kitsch, discarded, or sentimental—she examines how meaning shifts across time and generations. Her approach is rooted in collecting: fragments of text, found photographs, and objects whose significance has faded or changed. She uses these materials as a visual vocabulary to construct images that invite viewers to consider shifting cultural values, the residue of faith in secular contexts, and the uneasy relationship between intimacy and shame. Molly’s work reflects a process of reframing and recombining familiar symbols to question their enduring power. She is interested in the way religious imagery persists in contemporary spaces despite secularization, and in the intersection of personal memory with broader social histories. Recently, she has explored themes of guilt, feminine experience, and the commodification of spiritual symbols, informed by her background in art history and her ongoing interest in visual culture. She is influenced by the shifting aesthetic legacy of Catholicism in Quebec. Her practice combines a sensitivity to material with critical research on cultural memory, aiming to create works that remain open to interpretation while anchored in layered histories.

Publications

• 2024 “A bit on Montreal”, Molly Sturge, Self-published, 100 copies, Artist Book
• “Freight” by 45 Passers-By Artist Collective, Concordia University, Montreal, QC 2025
• “Curatorial Statement”, featured in (Un)familiar Spaces catalog, Concordi’art 2025
• “I will fly across the world, I will buy a house, I will never come home”, painting featured in Milk Bag Magazine, Group Exhibitions 2022
• "Grove Campus Art Series", Improv Montreal, Montreal, Quebec 2024
• “Interstice”, Concordiart, Montreal, Quebec 2024 – “CID”, Montreal, Quebec 2025
• “Mosaic of Us”, VAV Gallery, Montreal, Quebec Residencies 2024
• Production Micro-Residency for “Freight”, 45 Passers-By Artist Collective, 4th Space, Concordia University, Montreal, QC 2025
• Luisa Cattuci ArtLab, Berlin, Germany 2025
• Leipzig International Art Programme, Leipzig, Germany Solo Exhibitions 2025
• “Touch me, I’m Holy” Luisa Catucci ArtLab, Berlin, Germany