Shelley came to art-making later in life, pursuing a Fine Art degree in her fifties. The creative freedom of art college profoundly shaped her practice, which centres on experimentation and process-led discovery through printmaking. This course has allowed Shelley to develop technical skills while exploring how process itself can become a vehicle for creative expression. Shelley loves printmaking and is captivated by the way careful preparation meets chance, revealing not only the images but more often, the unexpected moments that surprise and redirect her work. These unplanned discoveries have become central to her practice, teaching her to embrace uncertainty as a generative force rather than an obstacle.

Personal Statement

The theme of Scissors slowly emerged from my first-term work and gradually developed into a consuming project. Everything about scissors is double-edged, being both creative and destructive. As Jordan Peele, writer of the psychological horror film Us (2019), observes: "There is a duality to scissors, a whole made up of two parts that lie in the territory between the mundane and the absolutely terrifying." Scissors as a symbol in art offer a range of concepts including precision, severance, the fates, creation, and the space between life and death. During this project, I have tried to capture both the action and the ethos of scissors—their capacity to simultaneously make and unmake.