S H A W N A C R O S S
to read an interview between Shawna & Borough click here
b i o
Shawna Cross makes abstract work that allows felt moments to become physical realities as she combines the psychology of color with the creation of form and rhythm to evoke the id and explore the chaotic circumplex of emotion. She was raised in northern Vermont and, infused with a large sense of wanderlust, studied in universities between the Adirondack region of New York, western Europe, and New York City; eventually receiving a degree in painting and drawing from Plattsburgh State University in 2007. She has studied under several contemporary New York artists, filled 19 notebooks with poetry, and at the start of 2009 became one of the founding members of Borough Gallery & Studio in Burlington, Vermont, where she works, and currently resides in Middlebury.
d e t e r i o r a t i o n s t a t e m e n t
There comes a point in one’s life when it’s realized that something isn’t working anymore. The pieces that hold together a life seem frayed at the edges; relationships become threadbare, connections repaired so many times their original substance has been lost. The process of making individual situations and relationships work-between people, places, ones self-when in fact there is nothing left to work with, brings all the walls down, tears holes in the ceiling, and leaves nothing left but exposed beams. This new series of paintings is built upon the raw emotions that lead to inevitable epiphany-the despair, the discouragement, the frustration; that are followed by the birth of new hope and realization of the fact that within every struggle to make the wrong pieces fit comes the lessons needed to make the right ones functional, and on ones own terms.
