Shan Turner-Carroll (b. AUS 1987) is an Australian artist of Burmese descent. Shan’s practice responds to both site and situation specificity, and integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The subjects his works have related to include both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his work. Not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location
His practice questions current modes of living, and explores alternative methodologies and modes of education. A deep philosophy within his work is thinking through doing. Over the past three years his work has evolved from still photography into a multidisciplinary practice that corrodes the boundaries historical and behavioural conventions have erected between art and life. Shan uses the ritual of art making and its transformative agency to question how art can find meaning outside of the institution of the gallery. At the core of his practice is the conviction that art has a meaningful and active role within contemporary, industrial, globalised societies in which the paradigm of the individual is most present.
Shan was a finalist in the 2017 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, Held at Artspace Sydney. He was also a finalist for the National Tertiary Art Prize and went on to win the Doctor Harold Schenberg Scholarship, Perth Institute Of Contemporary Art, Western Australia. Also in 2013, Shan received a University Medal with Honours (First Class) and was shortlisted for the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist award where he received the Nick Waterlow OAM Highly Commended Award for emerging artists. In 2012 he received the Jennie Thomas Travelling Art Scholarship to undertake research in Myanmar and Thailand. In 2014 he received an APA University Scholarship, which allowed him to complete an MFA (Fine Art) with The University of Newcastle where he also studied on exchange with Parsons School of design, The New School, NY. He was also awarded the Margaret Olley Memorial Scholarship for 2015.
Shan has exhibited at The Auckland Festival of Photography, 2016, Silo Park, Wyanward, NZ. During the same year he was apart of a three-month artist in resident program with LungA School in Seydisfjördur, Iceland. In 2017 Shan had his first solo exhibition in Sydney with Grace Cossington Smith Gallery in partnership with The Australian Centre for Photography (ACP). In 2018 Shan showed work in Weaving Stories an exhibition at Art Space Realm, Maroondah, Melbourne and was curated into the exhibition The 1818 Project at Newcastle Art Gallery, NSW, Australia. In this same year Shan worked in collaboration with Danish Artist Julie Lænkholm to develop and lead a workshop program called Magic In The Everyday at the artist in residency program at LungA School.
Shan has exhibited throughout Australia, as well as in New York. New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong and Myanmar. His work is in The Macquarie Group Collection, University of Newcastle Art Collection, Curve Gallery, and private collections in New York, Newcastle, Sydney, Perth and Burma