For thirty years Shannon has built things for other people. Brands, campaigns, systems, copy — all of it precise, strategic, and in service of someone else's vision. But somewhere in the process of making everything legible for everyone else, her own voice went quiet.
Then the world got loud in a way that couldn't be ignored.
The chaos, the grief, the disbelief, the rage — all of it landed somewhere it couldn't be contained. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a late-in-life neurodivergent diagnosis reframed everything she thought she knew about herself. The hyperfocus that had driven thirty years of client work. The pattern recognition that made her good at strategy. The emotional intensity she had spent decades trying to moderate. None of it was a liability. It was just a brain that had never been properly introduced to itself.
For a perpetually curious person who had spent decades working from the left side of that brain, the right side finally had something to say — and demanded to be heard. The art that came out of it wasn't planned. It was necessary.
What she makes now lives at the intersection of technology and art. Visual emotions born from a process that is equal parts intuition, obsession, and craft. Dark, emotionally raw, and undeniably hers. After thirty years of making things that worked, she's back to making things that feel as well. It turns out those aren't mutually exclusive. It just took the world falling apart for her to let go enough to embrace it.
( The Disciplines )
What thirty years looks like.
Brand Strategy
Finding the true thing a brand believes and building everything from there. Positioning, naming, messaging architecture, voice and tone. The work that happens before anything is designed or written.
Copywriting
Words that do something. Not decoration, not filler — copy that earns its place on the page because it changes how someone thinks or feels about what they're reading.
Design
Visual systems that hold together under pressure. Identity, print, digital, production. Thirty years of knowing the difference between what looks good and what works.
Art Practice
Dark pop surrealism at the intersection of creepy, cute, and emotionally raw. International exhibitions across Tokyo, London, New York, Barcelona, and Cyprus. The work is the point.
Civic Voice
Art is resistance. Beauty is political. Anarchyland, The Non-Abusive System, Courage for Democracy — the conviction that what you make and what you stand for are not separate decisions.
( Where it all comes from )
The Origin
Shannon is a Gen-X kid who grew up in the 1980s, and the visual culture of that decade is woven directly into everything she makes.
Robert Williams was everywhere and left a huge impression on her. Garbage Pail Kids were in every pocket in their adorably disgusting glory. At home, in a born again Christian household where bodies were sinful and darkness was forbidden, Shannon was carefully coloring Precious Moments books like it was her job and winning elementary school coloring contests in one of her earliest remembered hyper-fixations that should have told everyone exactly who she was going to become.
The tension between the sacred and the transgressive never resolved. The creepy and the cute were never opposites — they were always the same thing. The demand avoidant brain that found forbidden things irresistible grew up to make art that lives exactly in that space. Dark, emotionally expressive, slightly uncanny, and completely unapologetic.
The Lowbrow art movement — Pop Surrealism, the underground comics tradition, the artists who refused to separate beauty from discomfort — was the lineage that made sense of all of it. Mark Ryden above all others. Then Botticelli, because classical beauty and the lowbrow impulse are closer than people think. Camille Rose Garcia, Marion Peck, Scott Musgrove, Todd Schorr, Robert Williams. The artists who understood that the most emotionally true images are often the ones that make you slightly uncomfortable.
Shannon has a tattoo of her daughter on her right arm in the style of Mark Ryden.