Proposal
Wayfinding
MFA Exhibition, 2026

Artist’s Statement

Shannon Borg | Artist’s Statement

(b. 1964, United States)

Shannon Borg's paintings and mixed-media sculptures explore the intersection of time, travel, genetic memory, and abstract landscape painting. 

Her work transcends conventional landscape painting, with its notions of place, linear space, and chronological time, instead, weaving together the internal and external realms of imagined ancestral history, collective mythology, and personal emotion with abstract expressionist gesture.

Inspired by medieval pilgrimage maps and conceptual religious diagrams of mystics like Jacob Böhme and William Blake, and visionary painters like Ithell Colquhoun and Agnes Pelton, the artist creates a personal language of eight creative elemental forces that unify disparate histories, immigration routes, and family mythologies into a color wheel of collective memory and individual identity.

During her own pilgrimage to visit the birthplaces of her 16 great-great grandparents in Wales, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark and the Midwest of the United States, the artist gathered images and impressions, family journals and historical documents, discovering their stories and telling tales of her own reverse pilgrimage. The ancestors traveled for religious freedom and spiritual utopia to Salt Lake City; she returned, an atheist and artist, to explore her connection to their beliefs, trials, and legacy.

Through the use of geometric forms and color relationships, she reconstructs her experience into an imagined elemental “genetic code” for each of the 16 ancestors, exploring their physical and metaphysical journeys from their birthplaces ending in the artist’s own body and mind. The result is a deconstructed kaleidoscope effect that places the viewer in an imagined abstract landscape where they are invited to consider the artist’s metaphorical “tools of navigation,” and experience their own journey as they walk through the space, looking through transparencies, light and color into the artist’s imagined ancestral memory and connecting with their own placement in nature, time, and history.

Wayfinding offers an immersive experience of movement, color and light, inviting the viewer to explore their own identity as a member of the human family, a descendant with inherited creativity, collective memory, and courage, capturing fleeting images and moods from inner ancestral landscapes.