Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
A first-person note on the practical structures around making art, and why they should support the work without deciding what it becomes.
The part no one sees
I grew up in a military family and spent part of my childhood around West Point. That is part of my history, not a qualification and not a template for how other artists should work. It made me notice the systems around daily life: the people, timing, access and practical decisions that make a place function.
Making work also has a world around it. A painting needs materials, a place to make it and time to stay with it. A mural or public experience brings other people, permissions, weather, budgets and a site into the picture. These details do not make the work less creative. They affect whether it can exist and how people encounter it.
Culture has scale, and it has a life beyond the numbers
UNESCO’s 2023 publication Why invest in culture and creativity? estimates that cultural and creative industries account for 3.1% of global GDP and 6.2% of employment. I find those figures useful because they make the size of the sector harder to dismiss. They still cannot describe what a particular image, room, gathering or relationship means to the people who meet it.
A system should leave room for authorship
I am interested in infrastructure when it gives artists more ways to be found, to meet one another and to take part in paid work without asking them to hand over the meaning of their practice. Open-source tools can be inspected and adapted, but open code does not make private information or artwork free for anyone to take. Consent, context and control still matter.
This is one reason I built Countercult alongside my art practice. Countercult is its own network and infrastructure project. Sketchy Shona is where I make and show my work. They inform one another, but they are not the same thing, and a technical system cannot stand in for making art.
The practical part is still human
In one production situation, an agency needed last-minute help with logistics for an underground ballet. I helped resolve the immediate issue and used Countercult’s local knowledge to find and pitch two runners, one in Berlin and one in Amsterdam. The agency hired both. It was a useful example of people and local context solving a real problem quickly, not proof that every creative situation can be made efficient or predictable.
The systems I care about are the ones that support the work and the people around it. They should make room for uncertainty, for an artist changing direction, and for the parts of being human that cannot be reduced to a schedule or a dataset.
UNESCO, Why invest in culture and creativity? (2023)