Marches Makers Festival Artist 2019
Shannon Donovan
I think of my artistic practice as a process of visual translation, analogous to language translation. My work blurs the boundaries between outdoors and indoors, refined and vernacular, industrial and homemade, and craft and art. Themes that tend to recur in my work are an interplay between nature and artifice and exuberant visual excess. I find colour, structure, and paradox exciting and like to see what happens to our recognition of ordinary objects when they are encountered outside their normal context. Inspiration for my work derives from my training in art history and the visual language of Western decorative traditions.
I hold an MA in the history of art and left a career in publishing to return to university as a mature student, earning a BA(Hons) Design (Ceramic) from the Glasgow School of Art, in 2006. Since then, I have had three solo exhibitions and my work has been selected for more than 25 juried exhibitions. Since moving to Herefordshire, I have co-organised group exhibitions showcasing the region's visual artists. These have included exhibitions at An Acre of Art, Wigmore, during h-Art 2013; Kingsland church during h-Art 2014; and Aardvark Books, for Shropshire Hills Art Week each year from 2014 to 2017. In 2015, I was selected for a two-person exhibition at the Courtyard, Hereford, and in 2017, I co-curated ‘Fire + Earth’, a survey exhibition of ceramic making in the Marches held at Aardvark Books.
I think of my artistic practice as a process of visual translation, analogous to language translation. My work blurs the boundaries between outdoors and indoors, refined and vernacular, industrial and homemade, and craft and art. Themes that tend to recur in my work are an interplay between nature and artifice and exuberant visual excess. I find colour, structure, and paradox exciting and like to see what happens to our recognition of ordinary objects when they are encountered outside their normal context. Inspiration for my work derives from my training in art history and the visual language of Western decorative traditions.
I hold an MA in the history of art and left a career in publishing to return to university as a mature student, earning a BA(Hons) Design (Ceramic) from the Glasgow School of Art, in 2006. Since then, I have had three solo exhibitions and my work has been selected for more than 25 juried exhibitions. Since moving to Herefordshire, I have co-organised group exhibitions showcasing the region's visual artists. These have included exhibitions at An Acre of Art, Wigmore, during h-Art 2013; Kingsland church during h-Art 2014; and Aardvark Books, for Shropshire Hills Art Week each year from 2014 to 2017. In 2015, I was selected for a two-person exhibition at the Courtyard, Hereford, and in 2017, I co-curated ‘Fire + Earth’, a survey exhibition of ceramic making in the Marches held at Aardvark Books.
