Shonagh Short

Shonagh Short is a socially engaged artist based in Bolton, Greater Manchester. She makes participatory, playful work that uses language in its widest sense, including metaphor and everyday visual language, as a lens to explore class, gender and society. Her practice is process led, inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969) which reframes everyday acts of care as art. Shonagh has been making site specific work with marginalised communities since 2014, and in 2018 completed a Masters in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire. Aesthetically she is influenced by her working class background, utilising everyday items as materials in order to unpick preconceived notions and distinctions between high and low art, cultural value and societal status. She uses humour as a site of resistance from which structural inequalities can be made visible.