Web: https://www.shawnmarshallart.com/

Bio:

Shawn Marshall (b. 1968) is a mixed media artist with a background in architecture and design. She earned a Master of Architecture with a Minor in Fine Art from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kentucky. She is also a visual arts educator who earned a Master of Art in Teaching from Bellarmine University.

Marshall’s work has garnered international recognition, most recently with features in Curatory Magazine, Artistic Hub Magazine, Contemporary Collage Magazine, as well as in online shows in Create! Magazine and Visionary Art Magazine, and most recently, she was selected for Artfields 2026. She completed artist residencies in 2024 & 2025 with the Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe, which culminated in a solo exhibition in with the gallery in 2024, and an exhibition with the gallery in the LA Art Show in January 2026. She is the recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment Grants from the Great Meadows Foundation, and her work is included in many collections, including the S.N.A.P. Collection in Louisville, KY, Brown-Forman Corporation, PNC Bank, Commonwealth Bank, and the University of Kentucky, as well as numerous private collections in the U.S. and Europe.

Statement:

My work examines how femininity is constructed through architecture, material culture, and systems of power and display. Informed by my background in architecture, I approach collage as a form of spatial assembly, building layered environments that function as thresholds, vitrines, and compressed sites of desire. Through hand-cut vintage ephemera, florals, figures, and found objects, built up through alternating layers of resin, I construct worlds that are seductive on the surface and structurally unstable underneath. The work is surreal in its logic: scale collapses, spaces contradict themselves, and beauty operates as both invitation and trap.

Across my practice, I am interested in how gendered identities are rehearsed and how figures are positioned within spaces saturated with power they have been trained not to see. Some works approach this through the architectural, with figures dwarfed by or absorbed into institutional interiors, the body negotiating spaces that were not built for her. Others use the language of the floral still life, embedding fragments of material culture within a classic vanitas framework to expose the ingrained misogyny and commercial contradictions hidden in plain sight. In all of it, the resin is not a finish. It is a structural element, building depth, sealing evidence, and transforming the ordinary into something that must be looked at slowly. I am drawn to the moment when aesthetic pleasure tips into interrogation.