SHEA TINGLER

OIL PAINTER & SCULPTURAL CERAMICIST

BIOGRAPHY

Shea Tingler (b. 1999) is a student artist living in Savannah, Georgia, where she is pursuing her BFA in Studio Art at Georgia Southern University. Shea is currently a senior and expects to graduate in December of 2026. Her studies focus on a dual concentration in painting and sculptural ceramics, treating each discipline as a distinct expression of her creative vision. Shea’s work aims to explore the relationship between our known reality and existential unrest, transforming discomfort into curiosity. Shea has exhibited work at the Fine Art Gallery in Savannah, GA and the Contemporary Gallery in Statesboro, GA, both in coordination with Georgia Southern University. You can see more of Shea’s artwork on Instagram or on TikTok (@shea.tingler).

ARTIST STATEMENT

The art I make expresses an inner world that feels otherwise unpermitted by mundane reality. My work functions as a window into another realm or parallel, where familiar forms become unfamiliar and meaning remains plural. I am interested in escapism not as a means of avoidance, but as a way to survive and to wonder, offering a space where darkness, grit, and beauty coexist. Storytelling has always guided my practice. As a child, my mother read to me every night and through this ritual I learned to imagine visually before words could fully capture my ideas. Those early experiences taught me how images hold emotion, and how visual language can speak where words fall short.I work primarily in oil paint on canvas and sculptural ceramics, choosing materials for their physicality and presence. In ceramics my fingers become the tools, and in painting my brushes allow me to build light slowly. I begin each piece through writing, translating written concepts into loose thumbnails, then a refined sketch, and finally onto canvas or clay. Color and light are central to my process, where contrasts emerge and fade across the surface, establishing tension. Desaturated earth tones frequently appear in my work for their ability to hold warmth, neutrality, and quiet emotional energy, yielding layered complexity. Softened edges and subtle tonal variations reinforce the emotional undercurrents within each piece.Emanating from dreams, visions, and the inner psyche, my work explores the relationship between our known reality and existential unrest. Anatomical forms, dark desolate atmospheres, and unsettling details define the work, favoring truth over refinement. These elements create a liminal threshold, a series of in-between spaces. In these spaces, discomfort transforms into curiosity, and the unknown feels momentarily intimate rather than distant. I want to offer viewers a point of reflection through immersion and allow them to sit inside the work long enough for meaning to unfold on its own.