Shelley Carlisle

Artist Statement

I Embrace the Divine. This is my motto in life and work. I am a photographer, multimedia artist and musician, finally living my dream as an artist and building my art business. What is the Divine? Beauty, love, spirit, connection with the rocks, trees, animals and all of Mother Nature (including people). We are all sacred and inexplicably intertwined energetically and spiritually. In my work, I embrace and aim to capture this energy in nature.

Committing to a full-time artist’s life has not been easy. Due to being abandoned by my biological mother at the age of two, I spent most of my life pleasing and taking care of others, looking for love in all the wrong places -as the county singer Johnny Lee made famous. Taking care of others is rewarding, but I gave myself away in the process. It took 59 years for me to reconnect with and champion my inner power/Divine and channel this into art and music.

One of my favorite activities is to load up my tear drop camping trailer lovingly named “HRTEMYS,” and head out on solo road trip expeditions to the grounding and healing landscapes of the forests, desert, canyons, mountains, and beaches.

Armed with a zest for adventure and photography equipment, it is in these awesome and mystical spaces where I hunt for the most unique scenes to capture the beauty and grandeur of Mother Nature and the Divine. Through sharing these photographic images, I hope to inspire the viewer to step inside a magical place where one can be spiritually transported and viscerally experience the sublime majesty of the natural world.

These images are then employed in a myriad of other artworks: collage, cut-out animation, video and installation, exploring themes and stories of the Divine Feminine. My work is imbued with nature symbolism, numerology, mythology, and ancient cultures highlighted with contemporary elements, to evoke remembrance and embracing of our spiritual selves. My vision is to create meditative environments, often along with my original music, to create literal and metaphorical reflective works of art.

I am the recipient of the Fall 2023 Collage Artist of the Year Award at the Art Comes Alive competition and show with ADC Fine Art, and in 2022 received the Mills College Nancy Cook Fellowship Award. My work is exhibited in various solo, and group shows and juried art fairs throughout California and neighboring states and I have been a photographic finalist in many competitions. I hold Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art degree from Mills College, Oakland California, and reside in Nevada City, CA where I also teach youth animation classes.