Artist Statement

The time is now to reimagine how we as people narrate our connection to each other and our surroundings. Concepts of place, nature, home, belonging, and community are first imagined. Then our fluid definitions are embodied, shaping our actions and future. As an artist, I take this as my responsibility – to imagine stories that create our collective understanding of reality, clearing away dominant narratives that are collapsing all around us, opening space for emergent possibility.

My artwork is rooted in relationship between land and people, mapping a felt-sense of belonging and intimacy with personal landscapes. Understanding that geographies are far more than contour, landscape come alive with story. As Lucy Lippard writes, “If landscape is a way of seeing, there are potentially as many landscapes as individual ways of seeing, or at least as many cultural ways of seeing.” These landscapes are visible and invisible, constructed by our socio-cultural, political, and personal understandings of them; and we, in return, are changed as a culture and people by the landscapes.

My philosophy as a photographer positioned in the historically patriarchal, white canon of landscape photography is to queer the landscape. My current work examines how the Western landscape is laden with heteronormative, gendered inscriptions that are seen as fixed in place. To queer the landscape is to bring forth the subtle reading of what is already there, but vastly underrepresented, and also responsible for creating landscapes, perhaps only visible to those who know what to look for. As a photographer I seek to subvert the normative as a way to evolve our sight. My past work, (Un)Seen Lands: The Texture of Intimacy is a first-person, feminist reading of my homeland as a counter-narrative to the masculine, extractive, dominating history that landscape photography has so often centered. Instead, discovering the landscape as imbued with longing, memory, grief, and beauty, tethered to sight, conveyed through the body and sensory-perception.

As a queer artist studying the landscape I am aware of how one feels in a place is a reflection of one’s sense of belonging, inscribed on and in the body and within the land. How does the social-geography of place lend itself to intimacy with our surroundings? How do ours and others' personal freedoms – or lack thereof - literally and figuratively change the land?

Over the years, I’ve found that slowing down my process is essential for patient observation and imperative to the tracing the feeling I long to evoke. In a digital era, the lack of tangibility and materiality emphasizes efficiency and limitless possibility. Returning to the origins of photography, my artistic approach thrives through the constraints of hand-made practices of analog photography and printmaking. My practice involves medium and large format photography and tricolor gum-printing – a process of making color photographs by hand. The way I am forced to slow down with the analog nature of these practices tells a story that places value on the handmade, inherently subject to the constraints of nature and therefore imbued with feeling and spirit.

My photography is at the center of my writing, allowing the visual nature of my eye to also shape my words. I use a process of recording my moment-to-moment experience in the field while taking photographs, to structure my written word. I love the freedom of the essay, and the relationship between text and image.

Biography

Shannon O’Neill Creighton is a visual artist and writer working as a high school photography teacher and freelance visual artist in West Sonoma County. Her interest in the photographic arts began at age ten with her exposure to black and white 35mm photography, rolling her own film, and developing images in the glow of the red light. Shannon grew up in West Marin, an hour northwest of San Francisco. From early on, she developed and challenged herself by intimately engaging with the land around her, often with camera in hand. This lifelong relationship with nature continues to serve as a primary shaping force in Shannon’s life and artwork.

Shannon received her MFA from California Institute of Integral Studies in April 2018 in Creative Inquiry, with a focus on 4x5 photography and text & image. Craving constraint and materiality, Shannon returned to analog photography during graduate school. Her practice now involves working primarily with 4x5 large format and medium format cameras and printing with 19th century practices, including cyanotype, tricolor gum printing, and photograms, further aligning her artistic values with her medium, taking the qualities of patience, tangibility, and limitation seriously. Additionally, she is particularly interested in the way photography continues to reinvent and expand itself as a medium, combining old processes with new technologies.

She has been artistically influenced by the work of her friend and mentor, Tomiko Jones, and further by Nils Carlson, Tierney Gearon, Paula Riff , and Francis Baker, among many others. The intersection of place-based practices and thinkers, land art, queer ecology, ecofeminism, and liberation practices is central to Shannon’s artistic philosophy and values. As an arts educator, Shannon is consistently inspired and changed by the work of her students, who bravely ask critical questions, seeking to understand them through their images.