Art Practice
Exploring Care and the Human Condition
Mallory Shotwell's practice investigates the systems of care, labor, and resilience that structure human survival, centering the invisible, repetitive, and largely unacknowledged work embedded in domestic life, medical experience, and collective endurance. Working across drawing, painting, new media, alternative photographic processes, and installation, her work occupies the threshold between the personal and the collective, the tactile and the digital, the body as it is acted upon and the body as it persists.
Shotwell treats care as a subject of serious formal and conceptual inquiry. Materials in her work function as primary documents. MRI scans, waiting gowns, handwritten medical forms, the objects that accumulate at a bedside over months of recovery: each carries evidentiary weight, and each becomes a site where individual experience opens into shared recognition.
This framework runs across bodies of work. Suspended Self: The Liminal Space of Breast Cancer uses artifacts of the surgical experience to construct immersive installations that examine vulnerability, transformation, and the thresholds the body crosses without consent. Maintenance Body extends this inquiry into the long aftermath of surgery, producing a formal record of the maintenance labor that recovery actually requires and that institutional care never documents. Together, these projects establish Shotwell's central argument: that the labor of sustaining life is as rigorous, as durational, and as worthy of artistic attention as any act of creation.
Her practice extends into participatory and community-based contexts with the same critical intent. Workshops and collaborative projects are not ancillary to the studio work. They extend its relational logic into collective space, positioning art as infrastructure for shared reflection and social transformation.
Approach and Methods
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Material investigation across assemblage, new media, and alternative photographic processes, with attention to how tactile and digital materials carry and transmit personal and collective narratives
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Participatory and community-based projects that foreground the relational and transformative potential of art practice as a social form
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Sustained thematic engagement with care, identity, and resilience as conceptual frameworks with both aesthetic and political stakes
Philosophy
Shotwell's practice is rooted in the conviction that sustained, rigorous attention to overlooked labor is itself a political act. Through interdisciplinary investigation and a commitment to making the unseen legible, her work insists on art's capacity to honor what institutional systems discard, bridge individual and collective experience, and open genuine space for dialogue and transformation.
