Shana O'Brien
About
Life-death Web explores a transitional space, a weaving of a lifetime of stories. It explores struggle and resilience. I was drawn to spiders after visiting my favourite waterholes, above was a canopy of the most magnificent webs, covered in small rainbows from the dew. Spiders are often seen as frightening, as they cocoon their prey into the afterlife. But they are artists, they are knowledge holders, and they are resilient, re-weaving their web over and over again.
My grandmother didn’t get to practice her Indigenous culture in her lifetime. She wove her life story from blood memory with wool. Our shared story is a twining together of wool and reclaimed natural materials. I will spend my lifetime piecing together the parts of her web that she did not get to finish.
Bio
Shana is a First Nations artist and dancer who grew up on Darkinjung County, North of the Hawksbury river. She is a graduate of NAISDA Dance College and dancer with Wagana Aboriginal Dancers and Jannawi Dance Clan. In 2021 she premiered her first work in development Waterholes at Yellamundie Festival, as a part of Sydney Festival, which was then presented at Live Dreams and the MCA.
An interest in mix-media works lead her commence a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the arts. Her work is inspired by the land, the ways that we connect to the land and to each other. She likes to consider the ways that the viewers eyes will be taken on a journey when looking at the shapes, colours and patterns in her works, and sees this movement as a kind of dance she can evoke in others.