In a period of isolation in her Bountiful childhood home, Nakita Shelley created her series Porous Flux  offering raw red insights on finding sanctuary in the body. The visual embodied pieces carry a tension and suppression directly influenced by the nuanced constructs from trauma, isolation, and physical mobility, offering intuition of the vulnerability and resilience of the body. The included drawings, prints, and soft sculpture focus on a range of abstracted biomorphic forms, folds, and the intimate female body. By both the representation of the activity and inactivity of the pieces and in the physical creation, Shelley is breaking that chain of inactivity in herself, allowing the embrace of the natural fundamental needs with a “fluid response from one state of being to another”, says Shelley. Her work offers the viewer a space for intimate reflection of the closeness of the bodily presence, a fleeting illusion of the vulnerable one on one experience that so many need. For Shelley these pieces act as visual markers that make up the body as a roadmap, always in flux, from traumas, isolation, and outside influences which all transition into finding a balance and resolution to growth.

​

About the Artist

Nakita Shelley is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent works demonstrate a diverse display of media, including installation, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Her works often include the use of her own body as a catalyst to deal with carefully crafted and researched themes and concepts of her upbringing in her Utah community and its intersections with religion, the Anthropocene, intersectional feminism, the human condition, and the controversial parts of the female body. She has recently finished a year-long residency at Bountiful Davis Art Center where she explored the effects from traumas, isolation, and other outside influences, to finding transition into balance and growth through the body, exhibited in her show Porous Flux.

​

​

Artist website: nakitashelleyart.com

Artist Instagram: @sweetnakeet