Artist Profile

Peg Shaw

Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist incorporating video, sound, photography, and mixed media within layered site-specific installations including photography, video, sound, and mixed media such as paint, charcoal, dirt, leaves, thorns, petals, eggshells, hair, thread, wire, sand, and glass. Threads become roots, hair becomes veins, thorns become scars. The movement of video with the stillness of photographs creates the illusion of time standing still – and moving on. My work feels new and ancient, digital and tactile, mysterious and poignant. Profoundly personal and politically aware, my work addresses how we can connect across time and space, be so moved by an experience that isn’t ours, and truly care for people we will never know – floating on a membrane of what we have been given, hovering just below what we have to give. My recent work explores ideas ranging from “Someone’s Child” – a statement on our current society’s failure to care each other > to “The Compass of Bone and Stars” which questions how we find our way. My most recent video installation “The Noisiest Years of Silence’ explores the dualistic nature of isolating during a pandemic – while the world explodes with political anger and discord. Being alone while also being a citizen. I place my work at this threshold.

Bio / Description

Peg Shaw is an interdisciplinary artist incorporating photography, video, sound, and mixed media within layered site-specific installations. Profoundly personal and politically aware, her work translates, re-imagines, weaves, and layers concepts from family history, the memory of place, storytelling, and the filtered experience of living in a chaotic political time. Born in Oak Park, IL, Shaw received an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the Brown Fellowship Award, and a BFA in Painting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work has been shown nationally, including solo exhibitions in Chicago and New York, and has won numerous awards in photography and video, most recently the Illinois Arts Council Agency 2021 Artist Fellowship Award in Media, and the 40 North Champaign Arts Council 2018 Artist Ace Award. Shaw is a Professor in Photography/Video at Parkland College in Champaign, IL where she received the Illinois Community College Trustees Outstanding Full-Time Faculty Award, and serves on the Giertz Gallery Advisory Board. She has presented at conferences on issues important to the community college: photographic education, technology & creativity, and women’s studies programming. She has curated multiple photography exhibitions of alternative photographic work addressing both historical and new technology. She lives in the woods in a timber-frame home they built by hand. She bikes on incredibly flat roads. She is a shy drummer that only makes noise in her basement.