I am building Sketchy Shona between New York and Berlin, through painting, public work, tattooing, live art, objects and the realities of making a life.
Two cities, different pressures
I am based between New York and Berlin because both cities are part of my working life, but they do not ask the same thing of an artist. New York carries speed, density, ambition and a direct relationship to work and money. Berlin offers a different relationship to time, subculture, public space and collective life.
Moving between them does not make the practice more glamorous. It makes the conditions more visible. Each city asks what can be made, who it can reach and what kind of independence is possible.
Emerging means building the structure
I can use the phrase emerging artist when it describes a career still making its own infrastructure. I do not want it to suggest that the work is not serious. An artist can be emerging in one market and already known within a particular community.
The archive needs to hold the full record: exhibitions, client work, murals, tattoos, writing, objects, rooms, failures, experiments and the people who made the next step possible. A mark becomes a body of work, and the record of that body gives it somewhere to go.
New York stays in the work
New York is part of my biography and working history, from studying fine art there to the Whitney Museum staff exhibition, Artel Fest and the clients and creative relationships that have shaped the wider record.
It is also a future working ground. I do not want New York to function as a location tag. I want to keep a live connection between the city, the people there and the forms the work can take in that context.
Berlin is an active room
Berlin has given the practice rooms, walls, stages, studios, festivals and the conditions for DA SWAMP and The Floor. Those are specific parts of the work's history, not interchangeable scenery.
That is why the artist website needs to be more than a statement of nationality. It is a map of where the work has evidence, how it moves and what kind of invitation makes sense next.
A practice becomes an archive
The long-term task is to keep the paintings, objects, public murals, tattoos, installations and cultural projects in relation without pretending they are the same thing. The Journal and archive are part of that institution in formation.
When a body of work is documented carefully, it can be read by a collector, curator, institution or selective partner without losing its origin. That is the infrastructure I am building between the two cities.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona studio editorial based on the artist biography, Journal writing and public archive.