About Shannon
Shannon, who currently resides and teaches on Salt Spring Island BC Canada has a degree in Textile Design and Art history from Alberta College of Art, Calgary, and Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver in addition to a Masters in Arts Education - Simon Fraser University. She lived abroad for over a decade as well as studied, taught and exhibited in Japan, Thailand and the U.K. with sojourns throughout S.E. Asia for study and research. Her love of nature in abstracted botanical imagery culminated in repeat exhibits at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower show as well as the Museum of Garden History, London.
Both her Textile work and her workshops utilize motifs, materials, techniques, cultural references and storytelling to record a journey through multiple cultures.
During a Masters degree study Shannon pushed the envelope on her textiles to expand into the performative as well as installation work set within the forest.
Currently Shannons teaching embraces hospitality as an essential part of collaborative, informed making...join her in a place of safety and comfort , as she facilitates small groups on creative journeys for beginners or those seeking to push their creative envelope.
Teaching philosophy
It is always my intention to create, in a classroom, a space of sympathetic imagination and hospitality where the Arts serve as living inquiry beyond the teaching of technique. My personal artwork has been one of tracking and mapping my own experience of living abroad. Questioning shifting value systems as I moved geographically, then observing the residue, changes and nuances in my work, spoke volumes on how I tried to absorb and process different cultural values through my own lens. My work in the past served as a chronicle of my own living inquiry into culture and identity. My current work speaks more to the universal truths I have found beneath it all.
It is a privilege to bear witness to students engaging in art as a tool towards self-actualization, recording the profound “stop moments” in their lives, building self with informed intention through query and art practice, rather than later assigning meaning retroactively. Arts Education is essential in developing critical and creative thinking as well as a mature personal voice in citizens. Who am I? What do I think? Why do I think it? I regularly call attention to students’ everyday habits of engagement, their assumptions, practices and who they are in relation to others and their environment. This provides insight into the powerful corporate everyday aesthetics that shape us as a people in a world increasingly dominated by global commercial forces. I encourage and facilitate students to expand their frame of reference by engaging them in critical query of the experience of modern daily life and in big philosophical questions around language and identity.
As a result of my practice and teaching abroad, I am interested in leading students to explore culturally diverse ideas as well as honor a wide perspective in the Arts in the areas of the philosophic, the pedagogic, the personal and the practical. This approach helps individuals reflect and map their own experiences as a means to understanding self, while concurrently exploring and questioning the roles we play in society.
