The Artist

K Shanks (they/them, b. 1988) is a transdisciplinary visual artist working across the fields of sculpture, print, installation and performance, currently living and making in New Orleans, Louisiana, where they recently graduated with their MFA in Sculpture from Tulane.

Growing up in the high deserts of Southern California, they spent their formative years exploring and learning from the rich and varied landscapes and bustling urban centers of their home state. These experiences instilled a deep respect for the interdependent relationships between beings (human and beyond) and delicate natural systems, while kindling a distrust of the interruptive and often destructive structures imposed societally. This cultivated appreciation and suspicion are foundational to both their location based and embodiment work. Shanks utilizes weaving, stitching, quilting, and other labor-intensive fiber techniques as modalities to interrogate assumed frameworks, deconstruct binary thinking, and nurture new pliable relationships between their varied subject matter and content. Working from a queer ecological perspective through phenomenology and autotheory, they explore ideas of home, growth, transformation, and the construction of self.

Statement

I concern myself with bodies: their presence, their absence, the space they occupy—how they inhabit and move through that, how we cover and present them to the world, their infinite variety and numerous commonalities, their upkeep and decay, and their role as vehicles for our lived experiences. My work also deals in objects: their making, their accumulation, their consumption, their breakdown, repair, and reuse, our tendency to imbue them with meaning which is often the legacy of those ephemeral lived experiences.

Explorations of these themes take the form of intricate fiber sculptures ranging from delicate palm sized microcosms, wearable pieces, immersive installations encompassing entire rooms to performances incorporating all three with the added dimension of time. Dimensionality itself plays a large role in the conceptualization of each piece. Considering the interstitial space and tension between the three dimensions that we exist in and experience and the two which we primarily use for representation—the whole vs the parts. There is much slippage between the translation of the two, certain nuances that each handles more adroitly, especially as they are pulled apart, copied, and reassembled.

The manipulations are tactile and labor intensive: cutting, knotting, twisting, braiding, weaving, crochet, wrapping, sewing, and embroidery. Through all of this—materiality is key. While some items—thread, string, ribbon, and fabric—are typical of fiber work, others such as tape, plastic, metal, and paper are unexpected. Other processes find their way into the work as well. Drawing and painting are still integral to my practice in combination with printmaking and 3d printing. Each new technique is just another tool for deeper exploration. Disparate elements become so intrinsically intertwined by the time a piece is finished that they are wholly transformed. Differentiation of various parts and their origins becomes difficult leaving the the viewer with little choice but to be present as they experience and contemplate the visceral, physicality of the current whole.

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