Shawn Bishop-Leo

Shawn Bishop–Leo begins with an inherently mutable canvas and wraps her palette around the female form, grounding her artwork in the human body. “Like fabric, we drape and shape ourselves to Life’s demands. My work focuses on the dynamics of this condition.” Through her work, based on a fluid identity, Bishop-Leo embraces the complexity and dichotomy of life, “So many times we find ourselves split between schedules and between identities: part sage and part student, part God/Goddess and part servant, part natural and part mask.”

Her academic education includes a B.F.A. in English from the University of Dayton, in Ohio, and continued formal training in a series of upper-level studio art courses at Kent State University. As a clothing designer she became enamored with fabric and its ability to mask and reveal the body. Her sculptures focus on this intimate capability. “In the fabric we are the space that is occupied. I want to illuminate this space without the distraction of the actual body.”

Shawn Bishop-Leo’s most recent works, examine how we define our relationships and ourselves. She expresses this as a uniform experience in a collage of created, found, and often juxtaposing, images. In Goddess of Wisdom, the top layer presents a serpent coiled around a female deity where “it takes on the feminine characteristics of the secret, enigmatic, and intuitional.” The images below are “the archetypal operator and housewife, both embraced by similar coils of telephone wire, thus uniting the symbolism of feminine wisdom with the present with a wry twist.” For Bishop-Leo the definition of the feminine is an ongoing personal and universal exploration.

Bridget Brier