A personal return to America, Berlin festival work, DA SWAMP, THE FLOOR, and the unruly facts of making an artist life across continents.
America, with a cheesesteak in hand
When I stepped off the plane into the United States, I was hit by the mailboxes, five-lane highways, yellow school buses, pickup trucks, fireflies, raccoons, aggressive air conditioning and enormous iced coffees. After moving away eight years ago, I was feral for the fried food and the cultural noise.
Within half an hour I had eaten a Philly cheesesteak with lemon iced tea. My family has moved back to Philly, and we are planning a cookout with Sprite in the barbecue rub, karaoke, at least 50 cousins, a portable toilet and whoever arrives from around the block. We are also celebrating my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I have spent years criticising America from a distance, but homesickness reminded me what I love: the ability to make a celebration out of almost anything.
The artist manifesto, still messy
The whiplash is part of the point. I moved to Berlin to survive as an artist because the culture there offered forms of support I could not find at home, while the dependence on grants can leave artists without the independence of small business owners.
Public and visual art has always spoken to me because artists have always helped a society process existence. I compare being an artist to being a monk. You do not choose it cleanly, and no sane person would accept the uncertainty unless something in them kept insisting. I am heading to New York and perhaps D.C. until the end of August to make art, see old and new friends and dance a little.
DA SWAMP and the return of my work
For years I drifted away from my own art and toward work I could invoice in order to survive. When my visa restrictions loosened, I could return to the work itself. DA SWAMP became that return, and also a first step into installation and tattooing as connected parts of the practice.
At THE FLOOR, the residency space I run in Berlin, Latvian art students found me online, travelled by a 20-hour bus and became art residents. Sketchy Shona and Niamh Erin Cusack hosted a show there as part of 48 Stunden Neukölln. Hundreds of people came, sat in the human cocoon, fished in the frog pond and watched the swamp take shape. I even tattooed a frog.
The festival build
Eva Garland asked me to help create the Beach Stage for WHOLE Festival. We packed tools and materials into a van and spent weeks preparing the installation, including a five-foot-tall butt plug. During the build, a norovirus outbreak left half the crew vomiting and quarantined. By the festival, the virus had passed and I danced anyway among thousands of gay men.
The stage work is part of the same movement from mark to object and room. It leaves behind a physical environment rather than only an image on a screen.
THE FLOOR and the next chapter
THE FLOOR’s bookings reopened, with a last-minute September availability and winter places from November onwards. It is an artist-run co-living residency and project space in Berlin for artists who need room to create, experiment and collaborate.
With my artist visa restrictions loosened, I am also opening late 2026 and 2027 books for commercial fabrication, set design and large-scale installation work. For festival, brand-event or agency projects, contact shona.designs.studios@gmail.com or visit https://www.shonadesigns.store.
Originally published on Substack