Hi, I’m Shauna

I make public artworks that ask people to stop long enough to recognise themselves in a place.

My work focuses on spaces that are often overlooked or treated as transitional, estates, stairwells, walkways, town squares, edges and thresholds, places where something is missing, even if no one has named it yet.

My work reflects back to communities what they already know about themselves, sometimes only partially, and makes it into something larger than the sum of it’s parts.

Something visible. Something shared. When people see themselves reflected with care, it changes how they feel about where they live, and how they treat it in return.

Why story-led public art

We’ve all seen so many places that are beautiful but souless

New developments can be immaculate and still feel hollow. They’re polished and gleaming, but without any depth or memory. A neighbourhood gets a facelift and it destroys all the imperfections that were the essence of the community. Flat colour, generic illustrations, or decorative pattern can brighten a space, but often it stops there. It doesn’t invite recognition or start conversations. And the impact doesn’t last.

I believe places should be shaped by the people who live there.

When people recognise something specific, a shared history, a familiar experience, a local truth, artwork stops being decoration and starts becoming part of daily life. It gets talked about, argued over, gathered beneath. It holds attention because it means something.

That specificity is what I’m committed to. If a place only has one or two public artworks, they need to carry weight. Otherwise they risk becoming window dressing: pleasant, but shallow, and easily forgotten.

Experience

I work primarily with councils, developers, BIDs, community partners, and organisations delivering publicly funded projects. Often the funding is already secured, ring-fenced for public art, and arrives late in the process, which brings its own challenges.

Much of my work takes place in sensitive or highly visible environments: urban civic spaces, live public routes, heritage-adjacent sites, and communities navigating change. The recurring concerns are familiar across places, pressure on services and resources, population shifts, questions of representation, and a desire to make things better for the next generation.

My background in museums and galleries means I’m fluent in the language of funders, policy frameworks, and cultural accountability, as well as the practical realities of delivery. I’m used to working within constraints, time, funding and competing priorities, and finding ways to make work that still feels meaningful rather than municipal.

The artist

I trained at the London School of Muralism and was drawn to the physicality and immediacy of large-scale painting.

Working at scale changed my relationship to art entirely. Painting in public, in conversation with the people who live with the work, removed the idea of the isolated or “genius” artist. Instead, the process became about trust, consensus, and responsibility, doing the groundwork with people so the final image belongs to everyone, not just me.

Visually, I’m drawn to realism, reflections and light, both as a visual effect and as a metaphor. I’m deeply interested in textiles, pattern, and fabric as cultural language, and in how what people wear or make can hold stories of identity and migration. Mythmaking runs through all of this: finding the thread between everyday experience, ancestral memory, and universal stories that repeat across cultures.

My studio practice is a testing ground for these ideas, figurative, myth-focused, and exploratory, and often feeds directly into larger public works. In 2026 I returned to the school as the spray-painting and career guidance tutor.