Mara Shelton 2026

Life has so often felt like swimming through broken glass. Waking up and participating in a world that felt so fundamentally hostile every day wears on the soul. It twists and warps your mind into a thing black and blue from the evergrowing thumping, rhythmic beating upon your brow by a society that wants to force you, like clay, into a preformed mold of the model citizen. My work reflects my struggles to find a place I feel comfortable being myself. It is a representation of the roiling fear and anxiety that surge beneath a neurotypical mask that I, for so long, felt obligated to melt to my skull every morning, and just as painfully, melt off in a heaping slag at the end of the day. It is a cry into the void of pain and discomfort that comes with my own confrontation of my transness, and of the horrors of a forcefully changing body into a shape you don't recognize, a face that doesn't feel your own. My work is also a show of resilience, of hope. A purposeful manifestation of the emotion, both good and bad, that defines my life so thoroughly.

My work invites you into my space, my world. It is a forceful journey to a place familiar yet foreign, that roiling pit the boxes we learn to inhabit shelter us from. There is an evident theme of the twisting of bodily form present, a stark draw from my own experience with body and gender dysphoria, and the horror it became within my day to day life. I find my work so often becomes a twisted photo of my life and of my struggles. It is a broken mirror, of twisting sculpture forms, and harsh lines on roughly hewn canvas. The sculptures of my show Dysphoria are a conduit of the existentialist themes of my life. They are a display of warped clays, pulled forcefully into shapes to mirror the pain of growing up queer and alone. They are a snapshot of the pain I can no longer hold within, leaking out of my mind through bodies of metal and paper, skin and blood.

They are reflections of the hope and positivity I still manage to feel in spite of the pain, those daily bits of whimsy I somehow still manage to find.