Monica-Shanta Devon, United Kingdom

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Monica-Shanta’s practice encompasses digital film, interactive performance, installation and image. An aspect of her subject matter is visual language itself, its inherent cultural values, and the contexts upon which it depends. Using lived, sensory and physical experiences as the starting points for her work, she seeks to transcend culturally confined definitions of ‘self’.

I work with a range of media including digital image and film, installation and interactive performance. I 'exhibit' and perform my work, I enjoy creative collaborations, surprise commissions, and I engage in many co-creative projects in education and community environments.

A thread through my work is a striving to make tangible the magic of life in what we may experience as mundane, to make explicit the divine within the ‘ordinary’. From my immediate experience is of the physical presence of life around me, and from within a human body, lived, sensory and physical, experiences are usually the starting points for my work. Through an intuitive co-creative process of dialogue with life, open to engagement with questions of embodiment, I seek experiential pathways to consider states of consciousness. I engage with universal human experiences; Eating, Breathing, Walking…. as portals to metaphysical and ontological enquiry.

My work aims to transcend culturally confined definitions of ‘self’, exploring the experience of living, through a synthesis of cultural languages and meanings, seeking pathways between apparently opposed cultural concepts of what art is, and who artists are.