Dr Rebecca Shanahan

Rebecca Shanahan (she/her) is an artist and lecturer at Art and Design. Academically trained in fine art photography, she also draws on her lifelong vernacular practice in textiles, and her teaching and practice reflect a multi-disciplinary practice that has included performance, video, social media, and installation. Her work is informed by a framework of social, feminist, and political critique that has variously made women’s unpaid labour visible, interrogated the market as a primary value system, and more recently explored liminal spaces between art and activism, with longstanding enquiry into materiality, trace, transience, and the emotional registers of distance and intimacy and public and private states.

Shanahan’s practice-led PhD, completed at the University of Sydney in 2019, transferred domestic female needlecraft practices into galleries to enquire into new relationships between performance and surveillance, public and private labour, affect and disconnect. Both her teaching and studio practice continue to acknowledge the social and political contexts in which art is created and communicated as well as its material meanings. Her current research responds to the manufactured consent and anticipatory obedience of contemporary genocidal projects, borrowing on- and off-line tools and strategies of resistance.

Shanahan has exhibited widely in Australia and Aotearoa over many decades, undertaken artist residencies, and been a finalist in many juried awards and prizes. She is an experienced studio educator teaching across a diverse range of conceptually-led areas, with particular expertise in analogue photography.