Shannen Muhl

This heart is sore.

I spoke my years, through recalling unburied truths hidden, and now done.

This heart isn’t silent.

I’m still more yellowed.

Scars tell only reckless yesterdays I lived in.

Various ended days, pressure accumulated in nerves.

Art never dissolves.

Want expresses anxiety privately today.

After nothing done, walking into something held to observe.

Endings stayed closed and pulled east to obscurity, and not explained why.

Lingering in frantic expectation.

This, held in silence, I stayed marked young, through ruined unsaid things held.

An investigation into what I term the “animalistic default mode,” a primal, instinctual drive to retreat into a compacted, fetal form during moments of extremity. This response, triggered by extreme trauma, comfort, or pleasure, reflects the body’s oldest survival programming. It recalls the embryonic origins of the human form, but within this context, the fetal gesture is not about regression, it is the seed of transformation.

The series unfolds as a progression, tracing the evolution of the self in the aftermath of rupture. The early works embody the moment of compression: the immediate, reflexive retreat inward. Forms are dense, folded, suspended in chromatic voids that echo the disorientation of trauma. As the series develops, the figures begin to shift and evolve. Compression gives way to subtle motion: ripples, torsion, asymmetry, but the figure evolves into a more recognizable form, hinting at internal restructuring. A new psychic form is assembling itself in the dark.

By the final works, the self is no longer simply surviving, but actively reconstituting. The compressed body becomes a new being entirely. Instinct and abstraction collide to form something new and more whole. Unbalanced horizon lines introduce a sense of pulse, of becoming. The paintings do not resolve neatly, but they gesture toward a threshold where a new self forms.