Shawnee Danielle

What We Hear in Ceremony

Kyra Heneghan-Smith’s reflections on this work can be found here.

Live studio visit with Shawnee Danielle and Kyra Heneghan-Smith was held on September 10, 2022. Watch the recording below.

In the last few years, my work has cumulated into a series of portraits of individuals who I have studied intimately. Whether that be illustrating portraits of individuals whom I have a personal connection to or creating a connection by illustrating a single moment in their lived experiences.

My work explores my relationship to indigenous bodies in both a figurative and more recently, a literal sense. As a portrait artist, I want to create a body of work that alludes to a representation of indigeneity within the realm of portraiture. Meaning, I want to create and contribute to more diversity seen in portraiture than was typically seen in an otherwise Eurocentric dominated area of art. Even though the works I have created within the past couple years have been portrayed from moments in time, I want to embody these individuals in a way that captivates the viewer in a similar way in which traditional portraiture would entice the viewers’ attention.

After the first year of the pandemic, I had taken a hiatus from painting due to the moral as an artist to create a body of work in a time of financial uncertainty was the absolute last thing on my to do list. Or to be blunt: a complete lack of artistic motivation. After some well-deserved time away from creativity, I then began to take up art in a more accessible approach. I started digital drawing/painting as a way for me to not only jump into a brand-new medium but to create an art space for myself that was both accessible at almost all times and spatially friendly. The digital “paintings” became a good place to do what I loved most about portraiture that I could not otherwise do so easily in oil painting. It allowed me to build texture and depth in layers and zoom in closely on an image to illustrate fine line details.

The oil paintings I have been working on recently have allowed me to focus on not only physical body of the subject but to allow the clothing or in some cases, regalia, to be a part of the individuality of the painting. I began painting subjects in traditional powwow regalia not only as a challenge to myself in painting subjects wearing highly detailed garments but also to challenge myself to render textures that are beyond painting generic fabric textures. In previous years, I started the incorporation of beading as a textural element into my work. Some of the themes that I related to beading, not only the physicality of beads but the act of beading itself were indigeneity, femininity, trauma, body, lineage and discomfort. Some of the ways in which I had presented these themes were almost always based on how I used the beads to intersect with the concept of body or the paintings themselves. I wanted to incorporate beads into my work as a tribute to beadwork that is often used by indigenous artisans as well to hone on a skill often practiced within my own immediate family. More recently instead of a representation of beading, I found ways in which how beading becomes part of the subject of the paintings. In short, the way in which I began beading designs that become a part of the subject’s regalia in the same way you would see them in real life. It has become something that I am wanting to incorporate in future works, how they intersect with the texture in fabric not just the physical body as a concept.