Shawn Marshall

Lives and works in Louisville, KY, USA

Artist 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. By alternating layers of hand-cut collage and resin, I build layered environments that function as thresholds, vitrines, and compressed sites of desire, showing how gendered identities are rehearsed and how beauty circulates as both an invitation and a constraint. The resin is more than a finish; it is a structural element that builds depth, seals evidence, and demands slow viewing. My recent works engage the tradition of the still life and vanitas as a site of concealed meaning. What initially reads as lush and ornamental abundance, cascading blooms drawn from the Dutch vanitas tradition, reveals itself on closer inspection to be a more unsettling anatomy. Women's bodies are fragmented, miniaturized, and absorbed into the floral arrangements: figures nestle inside blooms like ornaments, legs emerge upended from bouquets, forms are engulfed and reduced to decorative element. Scattered throughout are fragments of commercial culture, from pharmaceutical advertising to convenience store signage, tucked into the botanical splendor like uninvited guests. The irregular shaped panels themselves participate in this logic, their organic contours mimicking the very excess they contain. By folding these elements into the familiar language of beauty and floral abundance, the...

Artwork