Shannon: My art practice started publicly in I eventually felt confident enough to start talking about gay issues, or myself as a gay man trying to navigate the gay world. The show at Anderson Rhodes Gallery is about the 17 years I spent in the closet growing up in New Plymouth, through the 80s and most of the 90s. You retreat into yourself. You had to do anything you could to hide your sexuality, to not be singled out. The second thing is, just be prepared to battle, and battle on, and perpetually come out.
Your friends will stick by you. Shannon: In my mind, some ideas best manifest through painting, some through sculpture, some though different materials. Shannon: I grew up in a Christian family. That meant going to church every Sunday. We spent most of our time in Baptist churches, but Anglican, Presbyterian, all sorts — pretty much every denomination you can think of, we went.
Each work is a chapter, or story, from each of those 17 years. In The Light is about my first boyfriend in New Plymouth. He was a youth group leader in the church I was part of. At first we were not openly gay towards each other, but it eventually got to a point where we came out to each other simultaneously.
The relationship between us changed, and we started to pseudo-date, and work through what it meant to be gay but also to belong to, and work within, the church and Christianity. In The Light is about something he said to me, when he was trying to make it right in his head, that what we were doing was being sanctioned by God. That was his way of trying to put my mind at rest that what we were doing was fine in the eyes of God. That was something we both struggled with, but something that helped us as a couple.
Shannon: As a negative. As a disease that needed to be cured. But to balance that, there were feelings of nausea at what we were doing. People knew it, by word-of-mouth only, as somewhere gay men could meet and do whatever they wanted to do — go off, hook up, but also, to talk with other people like you.
