Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
I have lived between New York and Berlin and worked in other places. Culture arrives through people, rooms, gestures and what we learn to carry forward.
I learn culture by being somewhere
I have lived and worked between New York and Berlin, and the places I return to keep changing what I notice. A city is not a mood or a backdrop. I learn from its rooms, streets, sounds, habits, pressures and the ways people make a life inside it.
When I remember a place, I do not only remember how it looked. I remember how people moved through it, what they made room for, what they shared, what they kept to themselves and what it took to keep going.
Culture arrives through people
Music, clothes, food, art, language and objects can carry culture, but none of them explains the whole thing. The mark on a wall is not only an image. There is a person who made it, a place that allowed it, a reason it appeared there and the people who meet it afterwards.
That is why I am careful about turning a neighbourhood into a look or a tradition into a reference folder. The visible part is real, but it is not the entire relationship.
An artist changes what they carry
I take things in, make choices, try forms and leave other things alone. A drawing, painting, tattoo, mural, object or room can hold something I have learned without pretending to stand in for everyone who taught it to me. Making is a way to work with experience, not a claim to own the whole place it came from.
Culture keeps moving because people repeat, alter, teach, argue with and share what they have inherited. The work changes as it passes through different hands.
Why I keep the conditions in the archive
I want the record around the work to keep its people, place and process visible. A photograph should not make the wall disappear. A project page should not turn a collaboration into a solo myth. A place should not be reduced to the image that travels most easily.
The archive is part of the practice because it can hold what a finished image cannot: how the work arrived, what changed and which relationships remain connected to it.
What culture means to me
Culture is what people learn from one another and keep changing together. It matters because it gives us ways to recognize each other, make a life, remember where we have been and imagine what could happen next.
When we flatten culture into content, we lose the conditions that produced it. I want the work to stay close to those conditions, even when it travels.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona journal essay prepared for the artist archive and grounded in the artist’s established practice.