Making Space

Shauna’s main areas of interest move around and in-between landscape, mapping and place. The places that interest her most are fractured, contested or overlooked and it’s how we individually, collectively and culturally define and mediate them that underpins her research.

She is interested in the relationship between geography and art and wonders if it’s possible as an artist to employ the language of cartography to create alternative mappings or counter cartographies. At its core the work attempts to deal with the collision of these two fields, cartography and fine art. Recent projects, for example, Travelling the Distance, commissioned by the Scottish Executive (and permanently sited in the Scottish Parliament), and Via, a photographic, travelogue, commissioned by the Toyota Museum of Modern Art, Japan explore this relationship.

Via Glasgow to Japan 19 days, 11 time zones, 11 borders, 7 trains, one boat, a green dot. 2005

The significance of unofficial histories and oral traditions in defining and redefining identity and place is core to current work and is something that Shauna is keen to extend during this residency at Glasgow Women’s Library.

The form that the work takes varies from sculpture, installation, drawing, text and photography and this is ultimately determined by the context.

Shauna studied Fine Art in Cheltenham, England followed by a Masters Degree at Glasgow School of Art and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received a number of awards including a Scottish Arts Council Scholarship at the British School at Rome and residencies at the NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art) in the Faroe Islands and Triangle Artist Workshop in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at major museums and permanent public commissions include ‘Windborne’ for The Meteorological Office, Exeter and ‘Travelling the Distance’ for The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, Scotland. Shauna currently works as a part time lecturer in the Dept. of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art.