Intuitive Mapping

Sienna Shields once made a collage in which she placed a dark, jagged form right at the center. Amid the  hundreds of paper pieces she’d cut and layered to create this large, complex, abstract work, it stood out. It looked like the silhouette of a female swimming, tethered to a sort of umbilical cord – not that Shields intended that.

“When I’m collaging I just go into this other space with my hands and my brain,” says the Brooklyn-based artist, 37. “Sometimes I’ll be about to put a piece of paper somewhere, and my body says, ‘No, it can’t go there, it has to go there.’ And I obey myself. I’m totally in the zone, the colors are having their own relationships, and I don’t have a lot of control of it.”

For years, she says, when people in the New York art community saw that collage for the first time, they would zero in on that distinctive little shape. “Oh, that’s So-and-So,” they’d say, naming another artist, someone Shields didn’t know at all. Eventually – perhaps inevitably – she crossed paths with the woman, and the two became friends. And yes, she found, she had unconsciously summoned a true likeness, in form and spirit, of an artist she was destined to meet. “What’s crazy,” she adds, “is that in her sculpture and paintings she does a lot of stuff with umbilical cords and babies.” To Shields, this kind of prescience is a wondrous but not really surprising element of making art.

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