'It’s Alive!': How Poet Shelby Shepherd Gives Life to Her Words
By Bella Kovar
How does one bring a poem to life? Poetry can simply leap off the page, stick with the reader because of an indescribable sentimentality, or become a beautifully intangible gift to a loved one. All of these things breathe life into something that is typically only ink on paper. 25-year-old Southern artist, Shelby Shepherd, has found a very special way of giving her poems magical wings to fly off and captivate their readers.
Courtesy of Shelby Shepherd
After working with Shelby during my most recent poetry workshop with Gut Instinct, I was completely enamored by her way of expanding the visions she has for her poems into completely new and innovative pieces. As a poet and filmmaker myself, I have combined two artistic worlds in previous works—making a short film based on a collection, adding poems as epigraphs to a moving picture work. However, Shelby inspires me because she opens up doors to completely new worlds and ways of capturing poeticism. I had the opportunity to sit down with Shelby and talk about her origins as an artist as well as what makes her style so singular and charming.
Having begun writing poetry at the young age of fifteen, Shelby found herself expanding as an artist and wanting more out of the poems she would write. Upon writing poems, she gets vivid images in her brain about the feelings she is trying to cultivate. She explained to me that she has always been attracted to collage art, film photography, and painting, and so, utilizing all of these elements to create pieces that properly capture her messages came naturally. Given the emotional depth and frequent imagery of Shelby’s subject matter, exploring different media types for expression is magically fitting.
“I don’t want the polished version of anything,” she says to me with a smile. Her career as a registered nurse also tends to inform her work, from anatomical metaphors to capturing “images of people in their rawest form”. Also heavily inspired by the Western aesthetic, Shelby wants to create things typically seen as grimy and remold them into substantial messages about beauty within the grittiness of being human. Her southern background, having lived in Texas and Florida all her life, feeds into this aesthetic and strengthens her tendencies to rope in authentic depictions of cowgirls, horses, and the ocean.
Much of her art is geared toward women and their experiences specifically. Shelby hopes her work inspires women to nourish their roots and reminds them that the timeline of their lives and growth should never be concerned with a man’s clock. She uses the body as the catalyst for a lot of her art and reworks it as a vessel of inspiration and admiration that reminds female-identifying viewers that they are a force to be reckoned with by simply being alive.
Being a part of in-person artistic groups and classrooms is a high priority that Shelby conveyed to me in our conversation. She plans to host a Make Your Own Journal Workshop with the Dallas Creative Collective in hopes of promoting print media and the significance of creating art in community spaces. Follow her on Instagram, @shelbshepherd, and keep an eye on her website sunflowerseedspoetry.org, for updates on her latest manuscript and to browse digital prints for purchase.
Shelby felt especially connected to Gut Instinct because of the emphasis on mixed media and how the mission of the company transforms voices into art—much like her own intrinsic habits as an artmaker. We had the privilege of collaborating with her. Check out her works and artist statements here!
“Follow Your Gut Instinct”
“Follow Your Gut Instinct” showcases a photograph torn in half with a woman's silhouette and an anatomical heart overlaid on her left side. The red canvas thread binds the two parts of herself she is fighting with, her heart and her gut. The product of tearing her heart open is hung on the clothesline made of Gut Instinct articles. I wanted to bring to light what often lies behind the product of good writing, such as the women torn apart behind the clothesline.
“What Keeps Your Voice Alive”
“What Keeps Your Voice Alive” portrays multiple black-and-white photo pieces showcasing a woman shredding herself, revealing poetry oozing out of her skin. The red canvas thread is woven into part of the model's skin, and her words represent how they blend together. My goal was to showcase that women are often the muse and poet, oftentimes tearing themselves apart to portray their true voice and written word.
