Shelby Shadwell: SHIFTING MATTER
In Shelby Shadwell’s work, an emergency blanket small enough to fit in a pocket expands into a drawing that spans a wall. Charcoal and pastel, both matt and powdery, create a surface that appears metallic, hard and almost unreal. One moment the folds read as foil; the next, they suggest a sculptural relief, a body or dark architecture. The eye keeps searching for order as the image shifts.
For more than two decades, Shelby Shadwell has chosen subjects with a strong physical presence: cockroaches, black plastic bags, animal remains, chunks of coal and emergency blankets. Enlarged to the scale of a body or a wall, these objects enter the viewer’s space with an almost physical force. Up close, they break down into marks, surfaces and contrasts; from a distance, they regain their form.
His EMERGENCY BLANKETS series earned him First Prize in the AH Magazine Artist Award. In these works, the precision of the drawing and the instability of what the eye recognises coexist, allowing the image to keep shifting the longer we look.
You have described teaching as a form of time travel. When you recognise your younger self in one of your students, what do you try to pass on, and what have you come to realise that each person must discover for themselves?
I try to instil a strong work ethic so that a student can discover a sense of self-discipline necessary for an artist to succeed in a very challenging yet rewarding career. It may sound clichéd, but I can show students a path; they must find the motivation to climb it. I also understand that making artwork is a lifelong process, and one cannot and should not artificially expedite the process through which an artist learns to communicate in a sincere way.
In your work, cockroaches, black plastic bags, pieces of coal and emergency blankets are enlarged to human scale or beyond. Why does working at that scale matter to you?
Scale is important to me because it allows me to use my whole body to create the work, and at a larger size, each piece has the presence of another being for me. I also value the expanded experience for the viewer, as they can have a different relationship with the work depending on how close to or far away from the piece they are. They can come to see how the abstract marks transform to create the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface.
How did the first drawing in the EMERGENCY BLANKETS series come about, and when did you realise that the subject could sustain an entire series?
Many of my works begin when I find a material, tack it up on the wall and draw it from direct observation. The same was true for the EMERGENCY BLANKETS series. It is fascinating to me that one can take a single Mylar sheet and shape it into a practically infinite number of folded three-dimensional forms. I think it was important to explore a variety of these possibilities to work through the ideas in my head.
Works shown: Emergency Blanket 7, 2022, and Emergency Blanket 2, 2021. Charcoal and pastel on polyester.
Charcoal and pastel are matt materials, while emergency blankets are defined by the way they catch and reflect light. How did you develop a process capable of conveying that metallic sheen in drawing?
The thing that surprised me most about this body of work was how a matt, powdery, abrasive drawing material could transcend its own materiality and create such a convincing illusion of something completely different, something shiny and metallic. The same was true for the VISCERAL series, where charcoal took on the appearance of wet guts in an uncanny way. I think this transformation is palpable in the work, especially in person, and conveys a strangeness that I am still working to understand.
In your artist’s statement, you also connect emergency blankets with migrants detained in camps near the border between the United States and Mexico, yet the works you submitted contain no human figures. Why did you choose to keep the material itself at the centre?
I am not trying to be didactic or moralising with the work I make, and I believe the work is stronger if it can act as a space for both political and non-political themes and conversations. On one level, I do not want to try to own the meaning of the work by artificially forcing it into a singular category or statement. I believe this is a more responsible and ultimately effective way of communicating complex ideas to audiences who bring their own ideas into a conversation that completes the work.
Writing about VISCERAL, you noted that you are part of the hunting community. What has knowing that world from within allowed you to understand, and what, if anything, has it made harder to see clearly?
Hunting and eating meat in general are polarising issues, and I have been on all sides of those issues over time. Currently, I have found an ethical resolution to eating animals through the act of hunting and killing them myself. However, that does not diminish the validity of other arguments and points of view that are counter to my own. In the VISCERAL series, I have tried, and I think succeeded, to make work that straddles the line between polarities. I have had viewers who are in favour of hunting and eating meat thank me for making work that supports their position, while at the same time viewers who are against hunting have thanked me for making work that shows the horrors of killing and eating animals. I think the work is saying that seemingly contradictory things can both be true at the same time, which is something that seems to be lost in the current climate of polarising political dialogue.
Have you continued to make one self-portrait each year? When you look at them together, what does the sequence reveal that no single self-portrait could?
I will always try to complete at least one self-portrait per year for as long as I can. I believe these “slow selfies” are an increasingly important part of my practice in a world that seems to be speeding up with technological advancements and AI tools. I see them together as a contemplation of metaphysical questions of identity, existence and endurance through time, questions I have found compelling throughout the history of portraiture, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Gustave Doré and beyond.
Selected works from the REFUSE series, 2024–2026.
In REFUSE, you returned to black plastic bags, this time using oil paint and a highly saturated palette. What was it like to learn a new medium by returning to a subject you had already worked with for years?
It has been exciting to explore oil painting as a new medium and to introduce colour into the REFUSE series. I have learned to think about the construction of images and objects and the process of making them in a new way. Ultimately, I think this will merge with my drawing process in future work.
In Shelby Shadwell’s work, time has physical weight. A large surface demands movement of the whole body; charcoal builds up and is erased; the self-portrait returns once a year. Looking has its own rhythm: moving closer, stepping back and returning. With each return, a fold of foil, a black plastic bag or a trace of charcoal begins to alter what the eye thinks it already knows.
