Shona Neary / Sketchy Shona
I make familiar rooms strange and follow images from paper to skin, wall, object and room because I want to know what remains human when systems mediate life.
The question under the work
I am building an artist-owned world through paintings, drawings, objects, tattoos, installations, public work and THE FLOOR. I do not mean that all these forms should look the same or fit under one label. Each does something different to an image and to the people who meet it. The question that keeps them in relation is what remains human when life is filtered through machines and systems that classify, optimize and mediate what we see.
I use digital tools and build systems too, so I do not see technology and nature as opposing teams. What concerns me is the point when what can be measured, named, automated or sold becomes the only version of life that counts. A body is not a dataset, a room is not neutral space, and a person is not only a role inside a system. The work is one way I test where those reductions break down.
A familiar room can stop being familiar
I keep returning to a familiar room or object becoming strange. The strangeness is not decoration or a puzzle with one hidden answer. It interrupts the routine way we use and read a thing. When an object or corner no longer behaves as expected, attention returns to the body, the room's history and whatever its ordinary function kept out of view.
That is why setting matters. An installation is not a painting enlarged, and a room is not a background. Light, distance, surface, weight, access and the presence of other people change what an image can mean. The viewer meets those decisions in space, not only as an idea described on a label.
An image changes as it travels
A sketch is a fast record of looking. When a mark becomes paint, it gathers a different weight. On skin, a tattoo becomes an enduring extension of an image, carried through another person's life. On a wall it meets a place and its public, while an object can be handled and live beside someone. At THE FLOOR the work can meet a room in use and the people inside it. Each change alters the relationship, not just the format.
I am not trying to make paintings, tattoos and rooms interchangeable. Their differences matter. The artist-owned world forms through the connections and the limits between them. A mural, a tattoo and a painting are different kinds of encounters, with different materials, audiences and durations.
The opposites need to stay in contact
I am interested in physical matter and spirit, physics and spirituality, nature and technology, restraint and excess. I move between self-command and appetite, simple living and extreme experience. I do not use these pairs to choose a winner or make them into a balanced formula. They keep the work from closing around one explanation.
A metal or porous surface can carry marks of contact, wear and time while suggesting something that cannot be reduced to a function. A body can look vulnerable or strange without becoming a case study. Nature can appear inside an environment shaped by machines. I want these contradictions to stay present rather than turn into a message that makes life feel settled.
Disorder is part of how I work
The making does not move in a straight line. I work through fragments, false starts, wandering, changes of direction and stretches where there is no clear finish. That is not proof that confusion is the subject, and I do not treat distress as a creative resource. It is a way of staying available to what the material, place and experience have not made clear yet. The work still depends on choices, revision and craft.
Why build a world around the work
I am not trying to produce one image that explains me. I am building a world in which people can encounter the work across different parts of life: as an image, something carried on skin, something handled, a room or a public encounter. THE FLOOR gives the practice a real place for that exchange.
I keep building it because I do not want the work reduced to one image, one medium, one system or one answer. I want the paintings, drawings, tattoos, objects, rooms and public encounters to give people different ways to meet the same unresolved question: what is left out when the systems we live through become the only systems we trust?
Images from this journal record
What stays human when life is filtered through systems / sketchy installation
What stays human when life is filtered through systems / human cocoon installation Artwork: Sketchy Shona (Shona Neary).
What stays human when life is filtered through systems / sketchy organic drawing Artwork: Sketchy Shona (Shona Neary).
Credits
- First-person theory statement based on Sketchy Shona's artist-provided ideas.