Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
I spent years trying to find a life outside art. Every detour, from my military upbringing to New York institutions, design work in Ireland and Berlin hard-tech, kept bringing me back to drawing, physical materials and the work I needed to make.
A Path I Tried to Avoid
Everyone asks why and when I “decided” to become an artist. To be honest, it wasn’t a choice, and I’m almost ashamed to say it’s one I’ve been running away from my entire life.
When I was a teenager, I won art competitions to help fund school. I only knew the military, that was my upbringing, after all, so I opened up an application. A diagnosed autoimmune disease disqualified me before I really had any other plan. My grades were best in art, while my SAT scores were mediocre. The Fashion Institute of Technology accepted me because it looked at past awards and my portfolio instead of standardized multiple-choice testing. I graduated, to my surprise, with a 3.96 GPA.
Odd Jobs, NYC Institutions, and Hard-Tech Laser Startups
Then I ran away. I ran everywhere, around the world, taking whatever work I could find. Hostels, farms, hotels, I did it all. Yet whenever they realized I could draw, paint and make things, they would pull me out of the fields to do that instead. Still in denial, I didn’t want an artist’s life; I was tired of begging for my food.
I stepped into the commercial and institutional worlds instead, working in New York for major fashion brands and cultural institutions like Tommy Hilfiger and MoMA, and later taking a corporate role as a design director in Ireland until the pandemic halted that. Emergency support funding arrived, not for that corporate job, but for actually being an artist. Still in denial.
When my visa ran out, the only one I could find in all of Europe was the Berlin artist visa. So I came, and they gave it to me. I saw it simply as my foot in the door. Even in Berlin, I gravitated toward hard-tech laser startups, pulling me right back into physical optics, engineering and the technical world.
Why Physical Art Outlasts Corporate Tech and AI
Now, six years later, my “bridge job” as an artist, whether I meant it or not, has become my real job. With mass layoffs, horrible job prospects and AI taking so many roles, the only thing that reliably pays is my art. Looking back, every detour, from autoimmune illness to institutional design to laser hardware, was feeding the same obsession with bodies, physics and physical matter. I think I am finally accepting that my path has always been this. So it feels like a strange question when people ask why and when I chose it, because for me, it feels like I’ve just been running from the inevitable.