Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
So far I have done this work in Berlin, New York, Galicia in Spain and Vietnam. The sketches move between pages and public places, and I am excited to make more.
Sketches made in different places
So far I have done this work in Berlin, New York, Galicia in Spain and Vietnam. I am excited to do more. The sketches are not a set of pictures I carry from place to place unchanged. Each project has its own materials, room, people or street to pay attention to.
I want to keep the sketches open long enough to see what a mark can become. One can move onto skin, a paste-up or a wall. Another may belong in a painting, an object or a room. The next form depends on the work and where it will live.
Berlin and New York
In Berlin, the sketches from Sketchy Sessions at Klunkerkranich came out of live drawing alongside jazz and DJs from the Countercult network. I was drawing from the city, music, nature and what was around me. I kept working on the sketches after the event. They did not belong to one night or to tattoos alone.
In Bushwick, New York, the digital sketch for my mural showed Carolina with her skateboard before I painted it on the wall. The sketch helped me work through the image before it met that particular surface and the people moving past it.
Galicia and Vietnam
In Anceu, Galicia, the work moved through sketches, an interior mural and an installation. I worked with found doors and local references such as Tambor, the village dog. I did not want to take an image made for somewhere else and set it down unchanged.
In Da Nang, Vietnam, flash sketches, murals and shared walls sat within the same residency. The marks could move between the page and the places where people gathered, changing scale and material along the way. The archive keeps those records together.
Keeping the sketches in motion
I call these Sketchy sketches because they remain in motion. Some become tattoos; others move into paste-ups, murals, paintings, objects or fashion. They are not all one collection or product, and I do not need to decide their final use before I make them.
I am excited to continue this work in more places. I want the next sketches to come from what is actually there, not from an idea of what a city is supposed to look like before I arrive.