Interview with Shauna Steinbach

Lorraine Robinson

Hi Shauna, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions, regarding your works in the exhibition, “We Were Already Gone.” They add a beautiful depth of dimension to the space and contribute to the exhibition’s themes of intangibility and mystery of the unknown. 

Untitled (with grommets) evokes an anthropomorphic figure that appears to cross the boundary between a three-dimensional and two-dimensional object. Can you conceptualize its essence and how its form speaks to that essence?

I constructed this piece from a commercial rubber doormat, an object designed to lay on the floor and provide a durable, yet cushioned welcome to countless footsteps. In questioning systems of value, I reworked the rubber slab, reorienting its intended axis and giving it dimension through peripheral undulations. In essence, this allows the material’s strength to operate in a new way, collaborating with rather than succumbing to gravity’s pull. I also exposed the underbelly of the mat, a surface intended to remain unseen. It is beautifully marred from the manufacturing process with a gestural patchwork of subtly differing shades of black. The resulting piece engages the space with a delicate awareness, its recontextualization providing an intermingling of vulnerability, disguise, and transcendence.

Diverter appears to depict a transmutation where the outcome is ambiguous. Please describe this incredible sculpture. What inspired it? 

Diverter developed over various phases of the pandemic. I started working on the central, ribbed object at home after losing studio access in March 2020. I didn’t have a clear picture of where it would lead, but perhaps in an attempt to deny the grave shift in circumstances, I continued to feel an intense drive to produce. When this feeling of resistance dissipated, I eased into a phase of listening and looking. I stopped producing. I questioned production.

When the studios reopened, I returned with the piece. Before the pandemic I had been playing with the idea of balance and decided to counteract the sturdiness of the object by placing it precariously on the edge of a small brick. Though touching at only two points and hanging halfway off, it held stubbornly in place, begging to be further challenged. I had recently purchased some artificial flowers in an exercise of trying to embrace what I loathed as a child. My mother loved these plastic replicas, arranging and rearranging them throughout the house. I plucked some pieces from the pile and placed them in opposing holes, transforming the object into a fecund, double-sided cornucopia. Overwhelmed, it toppled over. 

In straddling the seam of fertility and overburden, Diverter generates more questions than it answers. How long can this level of precarity be sustained? What desires are inherent when it comes to production? How can we introduce the idea of unburdening?

An important theme in our show is the idea of “being and becoming” – a sense that an unknown future need not be a source of anxiety, but rather a source of evolution. Do you feel your works fit into this metaphysical paradigm? 

There is an essence of liminality to these works. I created Untitled (with grommets) a few years ago and its changeling nature reveals that it may be a mirror to my own sense of becoming, in addition to an embodiment of transition. Diverter’s enigmatic nature, one of digestion, transformation, or purely divergent production, invariably gives way to abundance as it balances on a threshold.