bio
Celia Shaheen is an artist and educator from North Texas. In 2020, Celia graduated with a BFA in studio art, a BA in honors art history, and a museum studies certificate from the University of Texas at Austin. Celia’s studio practice oscillates at the intersection of archiving and making, using materials across the spectrum of textiles, printmaking, papermaking, and metals to investigate the shared language of textiles and storytelling, Lebanese culinary traditions, folklores of the animate and inanimate, and webs of lineage and longing. Celia is a 2022-24 Core Fellow at Penland School of Craft, was a 2021 Textiles Studio Assistant at Peters Valley School of Craft, and has exhibited in galleries in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina.
artist statement
Textiles and printmaking are the connective tissue in my work, and I am interested in the physical and metaphorical links across these media; as a surface for storytelling and communicating messages, as image-cum-object, as portable, quotidian, substrate, record, and as objects of relative fragility and suppleness. I am drawn to printmaking for its traditional processes and rich histories, and for the methodical, repetitious acts of creating a matrix and printing an edition. These actions are soothing, satisfying, and bring me into a rhythm that approximates dancing or swimming–comforting and strengthening.
My work emerges from lines drawn between textures, (text)iles, rituals, and family histories. Spinning yarn, pulling each warp thread through its corresponding heddle on a floor loom, pulling sheets from a paper vat, removing areas of ground with an etching needle, printing an edition– I’m often drawn to ways of making that involve precision and repetition, and I consider these practices as a series of rituals and simple acts of devotion. Much of my work is talismanic in nature, and I enjoy imbuing the objects I make with symbols of protection and prosperity, whether that be through pattern, color, or specific motifs pulled from historical textiles and jewelry.