Profile

Shuna uses a range of traditional textile techniques to create three dimensional flexible sculpture. Each technique is pushed to its creative limit. She continually tests, explodes scale, manipulates form and challenges materials and their natural qualities. She is regularly represented in exhibitions in the UK and internationally.

Shuna Rendel trained as a sculptor under Anthony Caro at St Martins. Her work stems from research, analysis, experiment and manipulation of international textile and basketry techniques. Disciplines as diverse as Architecture and Textiles provide the context for her creation of stable forms from flexible techniques and materials.Living as she does surrounded by her collection of over six hundred baskets from all over the world she has researched and analysed many woven, coiled, netted, linked, looped and lashed structures. These might be South American hammocks, bilums from Papua New Guinea or a turban support from the Yemen. Her structures build on the infinite flexibility from line to form, recreating the qualities of three dimensional drawing. Breathing, aliveness and resilience within surfaces and shapes are at its heart.

Central to her creative process is the interaction of type and scale of material with technique. She samples constantly, vital in achieving the qualities she wants and important in looking for essential balance and structural practicality. When creating form she is stimulated by uncertainty and the challenge of a structure with a mind of its own, taut one moment, relaxed the next. The uncertainty of this flexibility motivates her the natural movement, the breathing, the possibility of manipulation, of push, pull, twist and stretch that it allows. Her focus is on the changing quality of line, the building of three dimensional marks, the drawing in space, the energy and rhythm within the form and the relationship with its shadow. She is excited by the movement of the form itself, the movement within the surface structure and the movement of the line. Each piece is a search for that essential tension between flexibility and fracture, stability and collapse. Her work is about excitement, dynamics, tension, spring and stress. It does not come easily.