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 overlooked or treated as transitional. Estates, stairwells, walkways, town squares, edges and thresholds. Places where something is missing, even if nobody has named it yet.

I take what a community already knows about itself, sometimes only partially, and make it into something larger than the sum of its parts. Something visible, and 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?

Beautiful and soulless is still soulless

New developments can be immaculate and still feel hollow, polished and gleaming without depth or memory. A neighbourhood gets a facelift and it removes the imperfections that were the essence of the place. Flat colour, generic illustration or decorative pattern can brighten a space, but they usually stop there. They don't invite recognition or start conversations, and the impact doesn't last.

What a place needs is specificity.

When people recognise something particular, a shared history or a local truth, artwork stops being decoration and becomes part of daily life. It gets talked about and argued over. 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, or they become window dressing: pleasant, shallow, 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, whether that's pressure on services, population shift, questions of representation, or 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 of time, funding and competing priorities, and finding ways to make work that still feels meaningful rather than municipal.

I've painted over 100 murals in ten countries, including a six-storey building on Ilford Lane in London.