Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
Somatic experience is a major part of my artistic process. At my Berlin studio, it connects figurative and spatial work to questions about physics, entropy, biomaterials and the body.
Where Language and Mathematics Hit Their Limits
At my Berlin studio, my artistic process includes the somatic, the direct physical experience of the human body, alongside questions about physics, biomaterials and sensor technology. Spoken language and mathematics each offer incomplete ways of measuring reality. Visual and spatial art gives me another tool to investigate what living bodies feel and experience.
Language gives me a narrow slice of how to experience and communicate being alive. Mathematics and physics help describe the forces running through a room, including electromagnetic radiation, thermodynamics and cellular biology. Equations do not describe what a nervous system feels from the inside. Art lets me work across those limits.
How Somatic Experience Shapes My Figurative and Spatial Work
When I paint large-scale figures, construct a tactile shelter like Human Cocoon or work with ink on skin, I am not illustrating a literary narrative. I am recording a somatic experience: weight, tension, vulnerability and physical presence, things that words and numbers cannot hold on their own.
Half Life brings physics and spirituality together
I titled this self-portrait Half Life. I brought physics and spirituality together in it. While I was processing depression, existentialism gave me something to hold onto and helped me keep going.
Looking back, I recognize a thread between Half Life and the questions I am asking now about the body, time, entropy and material transformation. I am not saying the painting measured a physical half-life. This is a connection I see across my work, not a scientific result.
Connecting the Somatic Body to Science, Entropy, and Sensors
Human Cocoon began as a drawing of a body folded inside a porous silver form. At DA SWAMP, a person could sit inside the structure and meet the room through its openings. It gave me a physical and spatial form for thinking about how a body exists within its surroundings.
I did not test Human Cocoon for heat or moisture. In Entropic Antennas, I want to extend this inquiry into material science and open-source technology, asking how living bodies meet invisible infrastructures.
I am proposing tests with reclaimed cellulose, gypsum and living cultures such as SCOBY or mycelium to study biological decay and material transformation. These combinations have not yet been tested. I also want to explore copper antennas, microphones and open-source sensors to translate changes in electromagnetic environments and materials into sound. The instruments and methods are not finalized.
A thread, not a finished theory
Half Life, Human Cocoon and Entropic Antennas are not one experiment. Together they let me follow a question across painting, sculpture and proposed research: what remains human, and what exceeds measurement, inside a hyper-digital world?
I want the research to change the work as it develops, rather than use a finished theory to make the materials illustrate a conclusion.
Images from this journal record
Why My Art Process Starts With the Somatic: Bridging Body, Physics, and Biomaterials / painted figure sheet Artwork: Sketchy Shona (Shona Neary).
Why My Art Process Starts With the Somatic: Bridging Body, Physics, and Biomaterials / human cocoon installation Artwork: Sketchy Shona (Shona Neary).
Why My Art Process Starts With the Somatic: Bridging Body, Physics, and Biomaterials / human cocoon concept