Shelley Wallace is a Scottish artist, currently based in Mexico. Her training spans architecture, art history, and visual communication, with an MA with Distinction in Visual Communication and a First-Class Honours degree in Humanities and the History of Art. Her work is held in the Kanyer Art Collection, which awarded her a Kanyer prize in 2024. She has exhibited in Seattle, Thorp, and Winthrop. Her work has appeared in Ought, Spring Rider, and the anthology Entwined, and been shortlisted for the Broken Pencil Awards. She is now developing a new body of work that extends from her completed series ‘Embodied.’
About
My paintings are built up over months, in layers covered over and abraded back until something buried surfaces. I work back into the surface as I build it, breaking it open until what was painted over comes through in fragments: marks, colours, traces that persist against erasure. A crack is disclosure. The process itself, its methods, its materiality, becomes part of the subject.
Painting speaks the way landscape does, the way archives do too; in strata, seasons, and weathering, through gaps and missing and part-legible records, in residue, in what survives and what is scraped away. The body holds time and testifies in the same way, talks even when it can’t or won’t speak. Colour carries what words can’t. A mark might be a stone, a wound, a word worn well past readable.
My work stays close to these layered surfaces, land and archive and body, where what is lost speaks as clearly as what remains. It is rooted in the landscape and colour of my past, in close observation of how natural surfaces shift, hold, and shed time. What was covered over can be broken open again, and what surfaces and survives is a clue to what once was, and a witness to what is.