A floodplain follows a river. It gently slopes toward the water and is gradually built by the sediment being carried downstream. Sections of the plain are coarse or fine depending on the how the river breaks it’s banks; currents and floods of varying swiftness will carry stones and silt but its pace determines what will be able to settle. It is a place where the river dissipates its energy, to slow the flow of water or to store it when there is excess. Its ground is fertile and always exposed to the force of the river.
In many ways the works here are deposits from a flowing stream. Directly referencing where and from whom like fossils but also about how their imprint under pressure was made over time. The prints, drawings, and work are specific to a time and place vulnerable to force— a zone of skin, of raveling and unraveling fiber, of a moment caught and settling. This work is about many things but is most about that act of ruminating on something about to rest or be washed away.
Shannon Delahanty (b. 1991, Louisville, KY) received her BFA in Printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2013 where she was awarded the Hawthorne Hunt Memorial Scholarship. Along with many collaborations, demonstrations, and national exhibitions, she was a resident of Print Arts Northwest’s Emerging Printmakers Residency in 2016 which led to her subsequent solo show From a Floodplain at Jailhouse Studios in 2017. After living in the Pacific Northwest for the past ten years, she is now back in the American South making cross-disciplinary work that explores the home, the document, and their imprints.
For any information or interest in collaboration please email shannon.delahanty@gmail.com