ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shawn Marshall is a Kentucky-based mixed media artist with an exhibition history spanning over two decades and a practice grounded in a deep understanding of structure and space. After a nearly 20-year career in architecture, holding a master's degree from Cornell University and a bachelor's degree from the University of Kentucky, she made a pivotal decision at age 40 to leave the field, become a visual arts educator, and commit fully to her studio practice.
Marshall's hand-cut, layered compositions reframe traditional art historical motifs, exploring femininity, architectural assembly, and material culture. Her work has garnered both national and international recognition, with features in New Visionary Magazine, Contemporary Collage Magazine, Suboart Magazine, and Curatory Magazine. She is currently featured in a group exhibition at KMAC Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, on view through November 1.
In the summers of 2024 and 2025, she completed residencies with the Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe, culminating in a solo exhibition in November 2024 and participation in the 2026 LA Art Show. She is a recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment Grants from the Great Meadows Foundation, which most recently supported her travel to the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Her work is held in prominent corporate collections including Brown-Forman Corporation, PNC Bank, Commonwealth Bank, and the University of Kentucky, as well as private collections across the U.S. and Europe.
Artist Statement
My work examines how femininity is constructed through architecture, material culture, and systems of power. Informed by a background in architecture, I approach collage as spatial assembly, building hand-cut environments that function as thresholds, vitrines, and compressed sites of desire. Alternating layers of resin, vintage ephemera, florals, figures, and found objects create worlds that are seductive on the surface and structurally unstable underneath, where scale collapses, spaces contradict, and beauty operates as both invitation and trap.
While my early practice focused on atmospheric landscapes and later spatial abstraction, recent immersive experiences including research at the 2024 Venice Biennale and two residencies in Santa Fe, NM, inspired an evolution toward more personal, meaningful, narrative-driven work.
Across my practice, I explore how gendered identities are rehearsed within spaces saturated with hidden power. Some works use architectural environments where figures are dwarfed or absorbed by institutional interiors. Others use the floral vanitas framework, embedding material culture to expose ingrained misogyny and commercial contradictions. In all of it, resin acts as a structural element: building depth, sealing evidence, and requiring the viewer to look slowly.
I am drawn to the moment when aesthetic pleasure tips into interrogation.