artist spotlight: Shannon Linder
a multi-medium magician
At the risk of sounding biased, being that Shannon is one of my oldest friends (and has been one of my models for years, as you can see here), she is one of my favorite artists. I’m a sucker for anything magical, and Shannon’s work reminds me of a place that’s between reality and dreams. Her paintings, fabric art, poetry, and self portraits have always entranced me.
NOTE: ALL IMAGES INCLUDED IN THIS POST ARE PROPERTY OF SHANNON LINDER.
Shannon and I decided to hang out in my backyard one day, sitting under my Japanese maple tree, to record this interview. I love, love, love interviewing my friends in their artistic forms. At first, it was tough to get serious, maybe that’s because we were recording with a bottle of champagne, one of our favorites.
“My main creative medium is definitely photography. I really like to shoot self portraits on film. I choose myself, mostly because I’m my own most readily available model and I really enjoy dressing myself up as different characters or doing crazy makeup or exploring the woods, or exploring abandoned houses and finding cool locations. Usually I will drive like 30 minutes to 2-3 hours to go to some crazy old abandoned mansion. I bring a ton of props with me and haul three duffel bags of clothing and props and my tripod. And multiple cameras.”
I’ve actually accompanied Shannon to one of her shoots about an hour and a half away to Fort Hancock, Sandy Hook, to shoot in the old army base. She really did bring a lot with her, and teetered on many, many suspiciously decaying surfaces to get the right shot. That’s dedication, people.
photography by Shannon Linder
“I’ll hike to find somewhere cool to shoot. And then, I set up and look at my surroundings and change into whatever outfit is most suitable in my opinion, which can be tricky. ‘Cause there’s always hikers. Or if you’re in an abandoned building, you’re always scared that cops are going to show up or someone’s going to find you changing and be like what are you doing in here? It’s fun, though. It’s exciting, and I find that when I’m out on a photoshoot, I just go into a completely different world. Suddenly three hours have gone by and I’ve shot three roles of film.
It’s a lot about self-preservation, I guess. I really want to leave something behind for my family or for my kids one day to remember me by. I also feel like I have so many different parts of myself and my personality that I like to express through photographs. Because, you know, a picture says a thousand words. When someone asks me to just describe myself, I don’t always really know what to say, so I’m kind of like I like to take pictures of myself and, well, just look at them.”
Shannon’s kids are going to look at her pictures and say, damn, I have a cool ass mom. I really hope they grasp the coordination needed to take self portraits on film. The skill it takes to create composure, capture light, and frame in a way that’s permanent and you only get a couple chances to achieve.
“I also like to take pictures of people that I love because you’re never going to be the same moment to moment and it’s really special for me to look back on the pictures I took three years ago. I’m like oh my god, who is that girl? Or if I meet someone that, and it’s rare for me to meet someone that’s another muse, but I’ll find someone that I just want to capture the entire self and life and essence of in a photo. Because two years from now you could look completely different.”
I asked Shannon what a muse is to her. Or what kind of qualifications a being must have to be one, in her eyes.
“Someone that just completely arrests my entire state of being, that I just see them and I feel a way about them. It’s like falling in love.
Sometimes it’s falling in love, sometimes it’s just someone who has such an interesting face, or interesting personality, or moves in a certain way, or does a certain thing that just captures me and I want to show other people that.
It’s like, when am I ever going to meet someone like this again? It’s not even just a romantic love, like you fall in love with every single aspect of that person. You just want to put them in resin. That’s kind of what it’s like for me to take pictures of someone, it’s like I want to put you in resin so that you can never change or wilt, or what if you die one day? I want something left of you to look at. Just to document life.”
embroidery by Shannon Linder - Shop the collection here.
Shannon has the patience to immortalize people, which really helps in her medium of creating fabric art. Shannon created a “Grievance Quilt,” a unique artwork, that was featured in the Montclair Art museum. I have one of her pieces, the one pictured here, hanging on my wall right now. We have plenty more listed on the site. Shannon is my Visual Director for Collection Five, and she’s been a key aspect to the creation of this site. I fondly remember discussing it with her years before it came to life.
“It’s really fun. I’ve never worked with fabric before. I made a giant poisonous slug. I make weird shapes, like these red teardrops that I took to an abandoned building with my friends and there was this little water spout outside so I stuck the biggest one up into it. I kind of consider fabric installation sculpture so it looks like a faucet is pouring water droplets.
I really love that when I create, I don’t always have an intention. I just feel like people are like why did you do this? I’m like, I just felt compelled.”
“I’ve tried to paint what I wish was there. Like the circus stuff I’m working on, the tigers that have human faces. It’s traditional, but I don’t want it to be boring. How can I make this traditional thing more interesting or weird? My goal is to delight the viewer. I want them to feel delighted. I want them to laugh. I want them to be like HA! “
Shannon’s paintings are fascinating. They aren’t what you’d think of when you picture whimsy. But they are, in their very own, delightful way. The clean, bold shapes and vibrant colors are incredibly appealing, but the story they tell is really delighting.
“No one is ever going to cry looking at one of my paintings, so I might as well make them laugh.”
Her artwork is surreal, I’ve been seeing it for years, and I love it. But when I asked her to describe it herself, I gained a further appreciation.
“Well, in my photographs, the Meridian series…well, I know you love Harry Potter.”
(& I do, but don’t get it twisted, I think JK is a TERF and an absolute P.O.S.)
Photography by Shannon Linder
“When I was eleven, I was always like when’s my Hogwarts letter going to come? Because I so badly want to believe that there’s magic in the world so that one picture I took with the big driftwood and my little lamp, it’s kind of like a portal to another dimension. It’s hard to create and unless I had a giant budget to build my own set or something, it’s hard to create that story.
So I try and go out into the world and find something that’s magical and see how I can put myself in that so that I can believe that I’m on the cusp of finding another dimension or another world or something.
That’s magical, something that you wouldn’t just stumble upon. I try and create a different world and I want to believe that magic exists in me and the world around me, but I have to create it, which is really fun and that’s why I like to make my own props because the things I make aren’t things you can buy, you know?”
Photography by Shannon Linder
Shannon’s signature is a star embossment. She spoke to the fact that she just likes the shape, but she’s also used it as a tool to censor herself in her self portraits. Her star emblem gives her a feeling of safety, a creative version of a nipple pastry that she uses in her photos. Still, some of her photos have been removed from Instagram.
“I have some feelings about censorship. I’ve never posted an explicit photo, and I never pose in a way that’s sexual and it really makes me mad. Especially men, stupid men, who love to message me and be like oh, your pictures are so hot but it’s not inherently sexual in any way. You can’t see any explicit parts of me. I’m not posed provocatively.
I’m just trying to express myself.
If I’m going to be nude, I’m going to decorate myself.”
I asked Shannon if she feels like she has an alter ego that shines through in her photographs, because she has a way of transforming herself from my dear friend to another entity in front of her camera lens.
“Yeah, I have many, like the time I painted myself red and was a devil and scared everybody.”
And the age old question, “why film? why not digital?”
“I mostly focus on light and I like the way film captures like Golden Hour captures the sunrise, because there’s more emotion behind it. It’s like a moment frozen in time and I really have to work for it to get the settings right and to get the moment right. With film, you can’t just cycle through 500 shots and then pick the perfect one. You have to painstakingly set up every single detail before you pose. I will go three times into my spot and pose myself before I do the self timer. So, I have muscle memory to do it.”
She also has a knack for finding the most beautiful, haunting locations to pose in. We spoke about the gatekeeping of abandoned places by other photographers, and Shannon mentioned how a lot of photographers will find an abandoned spot, shoot in it, and then destroy it. That’s not the kind of pay-it-forward mentality that we like. Before a bumblebee began assaulting Shannon’s hair, we spoke about Fort Hancock, (which in fact inspired the novel I’m currently writing, and is pictured in the video above), and how she often returns to a location several times to plan out a shoot.
Besides being a visual artist, Shannon is a natural-born people person. On her travels to capture her photos, she often meets people who will be her friends for life. She just has a kind, unique soul, which shows through her presence as an artist.
“I don’t really brand myself. I am kind of a jack of all trades, and everyone’s like oh, you have to pick one thing to be good at or you’re going to be directionless. And I’m like: thank you, but no. I can be good at many things at different levels in different ways. Photography is my main thing, but there are other things that I do and incorporate into that, so I don’t really brand myself in a specific way. I just try and act like I’m magic.
Sometimes I feel like I’m talking in a circle trying to describe the point.
Sometimes there is no point. It’s just something I feel like. What’s the point of a feeling? There is no point, it just is.
It’s just something I feel like I have to do. I feel compelled, like if I didn’t have photography, I don’t know what I would do with myself if I didn’t make art. I don’t know what I would do. It’s just in my blood, it’s in my soul to make stuff.”
One thing I really love about Shannon’s art are her poetic Instagram captions. Like, hello? Who can write a bit of poetry every time they post a picture? Shannon certainly can, and she runs circles around the lot of us who sit there for a good 20 minutes to then resolve to post our picture with the sparkle emoji.
I’m really, truly grateful to have Shannon as a friend as to have her in the world as an artist. Her work will always captivate me, and we’re all lucky to be able to experience seeing through her tiny looking glass into a magical dimension.
a song recommendation from Shannon
Crystal by Stevie Nicks
Well, all being said, I really hope you enjoyed reading, watching, and absorbing this. Go out of your way to try to find a little bit of magic in everything. & as always: create sustainably, with love. ♡