Wild Swimmers 2021 -2026

The Atlantic has been a back drop to Shaunna’s life growing up in Cornwall, which has informed her ongoing Wild swimmer collection. The works are inspired by our healing relationship with the ocean. How we submerge in to the jewelled greens and blues of the Atlantic can make our troubles seam so much smaller, The Swimmers are often solitary, to highlight  the importance of how spending time alone in nature, has a positive effect on mental wellbeing, offering space for  clarity, reflection and emotional rejuvenation. The swimmers are always looking away from the viewer,  making them only identifiable from their hair colour and skin; this allows the identity of the swimmers to become subjective to whoever is observing. Shaunna feels this allows her audience to opportunity to envisage themselves,  playfully wading in  the dreamy coastal waters on balmy days, offering a much needed therapeutic outlet to the noise of the world.

This ongoing body of work is a celebration of the small, deliberate joys of being away. Taking its lead from the idea of desserts first, the series places anticipation at its centre — that particular sweetness of having something to look forward to, the way it carries you through ordinary days and makes the extraordinary feel earned.

The works are an invitation to slow down and actually arrive in the moment, rather than moving through it in search of the next one. In a culture that prizes novelty and productivity above almost everything else, these paintings make a quiet case for the opposite — for pleasure without justification, for rest that doesn't need to be deserved.

Each piece draws the viewer into the rituals of leisure: bright blooms catching the light in a sunlit room on the first morning away; a pudding trolley arriving at the door, laden and unhurried; fresh fruit and mojitos in the shade of a cabana; the cold, clean shock of a sea swim in a Cornish tidal pool. The imagery is rich and deliberately sensory, because that is how these moments actually feel. Everything is sharper, sweeter, and more vivid when the mind has been given permission to stop.

But these are not paintings about escape. They are paintings about presence. Woven into the indulgence are the quieter details, the traces left behind, the half-empty glass, the rumpled towel, the particular stillness that follows pleasure. It is here that the work finds its real tenderness. Not just in the having, but in the noticing. In the understanding that these fleeting, ordinary moments of joy are not footnotes to life, they are the point of it.