Wayfinding
Shannon Borg
Wayfinding
Geometry, Color and
The Discovery of Self
Viewers move from one space to another to experience three stages: Journey Imagined; Journey Experienced, Journey Transcended
Stage One:
Journey Imagined
The mind plans and dreams for the journey.
Timeline
Timeline is a 30-foot long piece that will cross two walls (preferably in an L-shape, two walls coming together at a 90-degree angle, the front gallery space. This piece will also include a table or wide pedestal and two side pedestals (Hierophant).
30-feet long translucent Yupo paper
Atlas Key, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches
Noon Mark, oil on canvas, 96 x 63 inches (not shown)
Hierophant - Mixed-media piece on 3 pedestals (one larger, 36 x 36 inches; two smaller, 12 x 12 inches)
Nocturne, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inches
Stage Two:
Journey Experienced
The journey is never what we thought, and always more and different than we imagined. Family, heritage, DNA & genetic memory.
16 Journeys
EIGHT (8) 72 x 36 inch standing paintings set around a table
Geometrical Wedding (What They Carried), mixed media, 60 x 72 inches (not shown)
The Bees (Grandmothers), oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inches (Part 1 of diptych - not shown)
The Moths (Grandfathers), oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inches (Part 2 of diptych - not shown)
Stage Three:
Journey Transcended
Connecting with ancient ideas and ancient light. Ideas and worlds turn as the Universe watches itself.
Tools of Navigation
7 hanging sculptures, each 36 inches in width. See a selection below.
Titles of each piece:
Borealis (Violet)
Depth Sounder (Blue)
Floruit (Green)
Loupe (Yellow)
Catalyst (Orange)
Pyrometer (Red)
Light Mill (Black/White)
Paintings
Compass (72 x 108 inches) (detail and full piece shown below)
Brighton Beach, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inche
Dymaxion 1, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inches (diptych) (shown below)
Dymaxion 2, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inches (diptych) (not shown)
The Wheels, oil on canvas, 63 x 96 inches (not shown)
Mindmap, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 inches (detail shown)
Depth Sounder
Pyrometer
Shannon Borg
Wayfinding
MFA Exhibition, 2026
Artist’s Statement
My paintings and mixed-media sculptures explore the intersection of time, travel, genetic memory, and abstract landscape painting.
Conventional landscape painting, with its notions of the specificity of place, linear space, and chronological time, is a starting point. I use these concepts to weave 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, I’ve created 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 my own pilgrimage to visit the birthplaces of my 16 great-great grandparents in Wales, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and the Midwest of the United States, I gathered images and impressions, family journals and historical documents, discovering their stories and telling tales of my own “reverse pilgrimage.” My ancestors traveled for religious freedom and spiritual utopia to Salt Lake City; I returned, an atheist and artist, to explore my connection to their beliefs, trials, and legacy.
Through the use of geometric forms and color relationships, I reconstruct my experience into an imagined elemental “genetic code” for each of the 16 ancestors, exploring their physical and metaphysical journeys from their birthplaces ending in my 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 metaphorical “tools of navigation,” and experience their own journey as they walk through the space, looking through transparencies, light and color into 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.
Contact: hello@shannonborg.com