J. Denton Shields
Department of Art, College of Fine Arts (MFA)
Panacea Beach Glass
For Shields, building connections to the community and land throughout his life in Tampa, Florida, nurtured a fascination not only with how spaces create experiences for individuals, but also with how the stories of those experiences characterize and express those spaces to others. Shields earned his BFA from USF in 2024, where he studied drawing, printmaking and papermaking. Moving to Tallahassee later that year for his MFA introduced him to a new space to live and work in for the first time in his life.
Papermaking, the center of Shields' art practice, is his way of engaging with a locality. He investigates the environment through interaction and research before harvesting natural materials. Having a goal of creation, while letting his immediate surroundings serve as a guide, he is led to the materials and ideas that become the artwork. Maceration is the term for the process of softening and beating fibrous material in water. It is a force of separation with the intention of transformation. Shields macerates the plants he sources by hand and machine, individualizing the fibers before bringing them back together through the chaos of flowing water. Through this transformation, a story rich with factual and conceptual information is coded into the texture of the fibers and sealed as they intertwine.
Shields provides clues to translate the language of his paper by playing with their form through installation, paper engineering, drying techniques, and burning away fibers with the laser engraver. The details in these works are not complementary additions to the surface of the sheets, but physical removal and alteration of fiber structure that calibrates the paper to speak to our perception. Taking these clues and working through the path backwards—from paper to plant, revealing categories, proximity, and possibilities—narratives of space begin to be revealed.
Artwork Description:
This work is a collage of photos taken from a hyperlocal study alongside FSU's Professor Denise Bookwalter, UNF's Professor Sheila Goloborotko, the FSU SCAP manager Aurelius Sutter, and fellow MFA Lilly Stumph. We spent the day immersing ourselves in the community and searched for sites of resistance. The connections we made led us South of Tallahassee to Mashes Sands Beach in Panacea. Here we witnessed resistance in nature and tracked our discoveries. I was drawn to the grasses that held the beach in place. Collecting the fallen blades, I processed the fibers into a form that embodied our experience.