The art of domestic life
Photo of Marie Shannon by AJ Cox
Marie Shannon has been making art that focuses on the home and domestic life for decades. Her emphasis on the seemingly mundane objects of everyday life often blends with stories and memories of her life with the late artist Julian Dashper and their son Leo. In view of the artist’s two concurrent exhibitions, she spoke to Federico Monsalve about her practice.
Federico Monsalve (FM): The home is a very important stage set for a lot of your work. Why?
Marie Shannon (MS): When I was at art school and first working with a large-format camera, I used to photograph very controlled, manicured gardens, such as the Savage Memorial. I was drawn to contained outdoor spaces that someone had already made sense of. Interiors were a natural progression from this. At that time, in the early 1980s, I was making panoramas, joining images together.
At some point, I began staging things for the camera – ordinary activities that had some kind of potential as images, which I could heighten by re-staging and photographing them. So, thematically, those images belonged inside the house, as that was where their genesis was. Also, on a practical level, working outside with a large-format view camera meant that I was often interrupted and distracted by camera enthusiasts wanting to know what kind of lens I was using, so that was definitely something to avoid.