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From, 2025, Charcoal, encaustic on panel
Shannon Delaney Ryan is a mixed media painter born and raised in Philadelphia where she currently resides. She received a bachelors degree in drawing and painting at University of the Arts in 2018. Originally setting out to be a children's book illustrator she became disenchanted with the commercial demand for certain themes and creative limitations and has since entered a fine arts practice tackling themes of isolation, anxiety and love amidst vulnerable landscapes. Her process consists of experimenting across disciplines such as printmaking, encaustic, painting, and sewing. Drawing from personal life, her current work acts as a theatrical reconstruction of diary entries and love letters.
This process I’ve been working with the last year or so is an alchemical merging of traditional materials such as paint, charcoal, clay, and wax. Drawing from my personal life, the works function as theatrical reconstructions of diary entries and love letters. Most of the pieces displayed begin as clay sculptures, which are photographed, transferred using chemical solvents, then drawn upon and sealed in layers of encaustic wax. I use wet clay because it is impressionable and shows the scars of life where even figures that are youthful bare signs of wear and age. I believe texture made by the hand is more powerful the further we stray from a physical world. The wax that envelops the images introduces a subtle distance as though the scenes are suspended beneath a fog, like a memory resisting clarity.
The work seeks to offer form to isolation, anxiety, and love amidst a progressively vulnerable landscape where we may clutch our memories close in order to face the future.
From, 2025, Charcoal, encaustic on panel
Shannon Delaney Ryan is a mixed media painter born and raised in Philadelphia where she currently resides. She received a bachelors degree in drawing and painting at University of the Arts in 2018. Originally setting out to be a children's book illustrator she became disenchanted with the commercial demand for certain themes and creative limitations and has since entered a fine arts practice tackling themes of isolation, anxiety and love amidst vulnerable landscapes. Her process consists of experimenting across disciplines such as printmaking, encaustic, painting, and sewing. Drawing from personal life, her current work acts as a theatrical reconstruction of diary entries and love letters.
This process I’ve been working with the last year or so is an alchemical merging of traditional materials such as paint, charcoal, clay, and wax. Drawing from my personal life, the works function as theatrical reconstructions of diary entries and love letters. Most of the pieces displayed begin as clay sculptures, which are photographed, transferred using chemical solvents, then drawn upon and sealed in layers of encaustic wax. I use wet clay because it is impressionable and shows the scars of life where even figures that are youthful bare signs of wear and age. I believe texture made by the hand is more powerful the further we stray from a physical world. The wax that envelops the images introduces a subtle distance as though the scenes are suspended beneath a fog, like a memory resisting clarity.
The work seeks to offer form to isolation, anxiety, and love amidst a progressively vulnerable landscape where we may clutch our memories close in order to face the future.
