Shawn Adair

Artist in Rome

The original Artist in Rome series was created during an earlier stay in Rome using discarded architectural drawings left behind by architecture students visiting the city. Those abandoned plans became more than a surface; they became part of the work’s meaning. Already marked by systems of structure, measurement, and imagined space, they provided a framework through which I could respond to Rome’s extraordinary accumulation of history.

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Returning to Rome now offers an opportunity to revisit that conversation from a different point in my life and through a different medium.

This new series will be created through photography and digital collage. Rather than working directly on found architectural drawings, I will gather photographic fragments of the city—architecture, surfaces, worn stone, religious spaces, construction, decay, ornament, graffiti, and the ordinary evidence of contemporary life—and layer them into constructed images.

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I am interested in the contrasts that seem inseparable from Rome: order and deterioration, permanence and fragility, sacred and ordinary, ancient and contemporary. The city is not experienced as a single historical moment, but as an accumulation of many moments occupying the same space.

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Returning to Rome also introduces memory into the work. I will be encountering a place I once knew through the distance of time, experience, and change. The new images will therefore become not simply responses to Rome as it exists now, but collages of observation, memory, history, and personal experience.

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In the earlier work, I wrote about trying simply to add my mark to the collage that is Rome. This new series continues that idea—only now the collage itself becomes the medium.