Shona Nunan was born in Melbourne, Australia but takes inspiration from around the world. Fascinated by the ancient, Shona talks of her journey and the impact seeing guardian figures at an aboriginal cave had on her.
A podcast where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose.
From Australia, I take influences from the Aboriginal culture and the landscape. And when I come back to Italy, I take the ancient. Ancient man always had archetypal images that that they would put up, you know, like the fertility, the woman, the seasons, being in balance with life. Women are embraced for something deeper. And coming to Europe, the women are really women.
Shona Nunan:They're proud of it. They love being feminine. So that was a bit of a journey to to embrace being a woman.
Sarah Monk:Hi. This is Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. In this series, we're talking to artists in Italy in a town called Pietrasanta, 15 miles south of the Carrara Marble Mountains. Pietrasanta has a long tradition of marble carving studios and also of foundries which realize artists' work in bronze. Today, I'm talking to Australian sculptor, Shona Nunan, who first came to the area 37 years ago.
Sarah Monk:We met in Pietrasanta's central square, the Piazza Duomo, and started to walk uphill. To our left is the old theater, now a cinema, and on our right, the church of Sant'Agostino, which hosts concerts and art exhibitions. Sant'Agostino is also home to the Museo de Bozzetti, which has over 700 maquettes or reduced scale models, donated by sculptors who've worked here over the years. It gives an extraordinary insight into the body of work produced here. Uphill, Shona and I settle in a small public park overlooking the Piazza Duomo.
Sarah Monk:Children play around us, and in the corner is a water trough with a plaque marking the route of the Via Francigena, the ancient pilgrims route from Canterbury to Rome.
Shona Nunan:My name is Shona Nunan. I'm I'm a sculptor, I'm Australian, but I actually feel like I'm global, really. I feel like I belong to the world, because I like to take influences from all around the world. It feels really important to my art, to my growth as a person, and to the growth of my artwork.
Sarah Monk:So where were you born?
Shona Nunan:I was born in, a little town north of Melbourne in the south of Australia.
Sarah Monk:Why did you come to Italy?
Shona Nunan:To tell ourselves and the world that we are artists, and that was the only road we were taking. It was a huge act of bravery to do it because, there was so much to fight and were young, middle class kids who just didn't fit the system. And so we had to break it. And going to Italy, it was momentous. It was absolutely momentous.
Shona Nunan:And we believe that our children came to us, because they chose us. We believe they chose us as much as we chose them. So we thought, without any guilt, that we're gonna do what we did. So we've bragged them all over the world. And now the 2 boys are both artists, wonderful artists themselves, and, oh, dear.
Shona Nunan:Sometimes I feel a bit guilty, but, no, I keep saying, no, they choose us too. We just had all these dreams that we just put out there, and and our upbringing said, no, go and join suburbia, I suppose, and do the correct thing. We didn't I think we taught for 2 years, and then we decided, no, we're leaving. We're we're going to Italy. So we went to Italy with our little 18 monther
Sarah Monk:and that's Jake.
Shona Nunan:That's Jacob. And so he went we went to Italy and we ended up in Carrara.
Sarah Monk:So what was Carrara like? That's 35 years ago, I guess, because Jake Jake's 37, so
Shona Nunan:Carrara was fantastic. What a place. It was thriving. There were artists everywhere. We were really poor.
Shona Nunan:We'd had no hot water, no heating. And I worked in the upstairs room of our little house, where I did works towards bronze, where it was my dream. I didn't get them cast for years, but it was the dream. And we came to Pietrasanta to look at the foundries, peering in behind the gates and
Sarah Monk:going, we felt like we would never get there, but we did. Nothing like starting putting one foot forward. Eventually, you meet the dream.
Shona Nunan:We couldn't afford the lunches even in those days. We went out occasionally, once or twice a month, to to have the Prancer del Voro. And all these American artists were there, and they were all being sponsored by their galleries. We were so amazed. We thought the Americans were the most kindly giving people, you know, they were always supporting their artists.
Shona Nunan:So there were always these young kids going around throwing money left, right, and center, living really well, and, doing the art they wanted to do, which is great. It took you out of the the mentality that artists had to suffer and that they had to be in the garage. And it's really important to change that mentality, otherwise, you never achieve anything. You gotta you gotta change how you think. So that began the journey of how to think as an artist, a free artist.
Sarah Monk:How was your work progressing then?
Shona Nunan:I was up in the top floor of our little house. It was just a big empty room with wonderful light overlooking the sea. It was just beautiful. I was working in plaster, so I'd go for a walk in the olive groves and into the forest, and I'd find beautiful sticks, and the beautiful sticks are put together, and they became the language of the work, elongated figurative work. And it became the beginning of those works.
Shona Nunan:I've always been quite elongated with my work. I'm attracted to elongation. It was really difficult finding my avenue. Eventually, I chose bronze because bronze had all that tensile strength. It allowed really skinny, bits and pieces coming out.
Sarah Monk:Really? That's why you chose bronze, because of elongation?
Shona Nunan:Yeah. Yeah. I was working in wood because of my stringy long pieces, and it was beautiful. But I ended up being really affected by the dust because everything's dusty, because you're using a chainsaw and all the different tools you have to have. And I ended up getting lots of sinus problems.
Shona Nunan:So from there, I decided I would work towards bronze, and that's really helped me. Then as I got a bit older, it's probably me too, I got a bit wider, so did my artwork.
Sarah Monk:You don't look very wide, to me, Shona! (laughter)
Shona Nunan:And so and then I think it went on to I was really attracted to stone then, because I could work in the stone, whereas elongated works really couldn't, didn't go. It's wrong to use stone in a way that's not its nature, so that's truth to material.
Sarah Monk:Indeed.
Sarah Monk:What sort of family were you born into? What did they do?
Shona Nunan:My father was a a painter. I would say that my father was the one who really influenced my journey as an artist, because I remember sitting under his easel when I was, like, 3, watching him paint.
Sarah Monk:How would you say you started off as an artist? What were your first memories of doing art yourself?
Shona Nunan:Painting my father's paintings, actually. Because I loved watching him paint. I just always believed I was gonna be an artist too. I thought I was gonna be a painter. But as I grew older and then I started playing with clay, I realized how much I loved form.
Shona Nunan:So as a teenager, I knew I was gonna be a sculptor. I was brought up in a probably a very conservative way. I was going to an all girls Catholic college, and there wasn't a lot of art. And I just yearned, I really yearned just to to do my art. And finally, my mother agreed, and she took me to a college in Melbourne.
Shona Nunan:I ended up going there for my final years of secondary school, and from there went on to RMIT, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for sculpture. So I did a Bachelor in Fine Art.
Sarah Monk:And how old were you then?
Shona Nunan:17.
Sarah Monk:And how did you feel doing that course?
Shona Nunan:Liberated. We had Italian teachers and, one of the other lecturers was from Lithuania, and he was really conservative. He was really a formidable man. He taught me a lot about restraint, and that that was a really good thing for me because sometimes you can get romantically over expressive. And so he he held that back, pulled pulled it back.
Shona Nunan:It made me consider the moment before action, always hold back, so that you always have the feeling and presence in the work, the work about to move, about to make itself known to you. So all the energies retained in the sculpture, it's not gone with the expression of I'm running, I'm doing something.
Sarah Monk:So, we're at the end of your college now. Do you did you work up to, like, a final show? And by the time you'd worked up to the end of college, did you know what the next step would be?
Shona Nunan:Well, in the middle of college, I deferred for 2 years. And that was fantastic because I traveled. I did a lot of real study of different cultures. It was a beautiful, enriching time of my life. And I also traveled up North with my father, the North of Australia.
Shona Nunan:And he and he really loves Aboriginal culture and he loves the land. We found really beautiful ancient caves. In some of these caves, there were these guardian figures. The guardian figures have really influenced a lot of my work from that period on, but also probably because being brought up Catholic, you have angels and things like that, so you think of guardian figures. These beautiful guardian figures in front of this Aboriginal cave, and their stories in their cave paintings has really influenced my work.
Sarah Monk:How would you define a guardian figure?
Shona Nunan:The guardian figures are usually male and female for me, And for me, it represents yin and yang, day and night, consciousness and unconsciousness. And I feel like you need guardians at the entrance of your mind. You need them to filter out things that are bad for you, you know, that take away your energy. I also like them at the entrance of a house. They've changed over the years.
Shona Nunan:At first, they were very literal, they're figurative, really, really figurative. But more and more as I've gone by, the abstraction of life is more important than the elements that you relate to, but you still gotta relate to it. So my latest guardians are a bit like shields, a male and a female shield. And the shield is sort of a bit leaf like, and they've just come from different influences. You look for them in your life.
Shona Nunan:You look for things to change your language, to grow your language. When we were in Asia, we'd spend hours just looking at shells and different things. One day, we picked up this beautiful tortoiseshell, and it was just, it was the rib of of part of the shell on the outside, and it just told a story of another guardian. These beautiful markings on the back, the simplicity of the back, and the and the and the firmness, and then the the soft gentleness inside of the shell. You find these languages that come into your work, and the women figures have been really influenced by what I see in different cultures too.
Shona Nunan:I love the woman form as a vessel form, because I see her as cyclic fertility. I'm always looking for things that embody those attributes of of the female.
Sarah Monk:When you were talking about the shell, I was just wondering, is this something to do with home? Is home part of what one is feeling with a guardian? Is it a safety at home thing? Because they make me feel safe, the way you explain them.
Shona Nunan:It is about being safe. I don't know whether it's about being home. I think you have to feel you're safe anywhere in life, but I also think an artist invests something in their artwork. So there's a feeling within the the work that it is that, it represents that. So I think when you focus on when you look at a piece and you say, oh, I love those guardians, and you feel safe, it's creating a whole atmosphere around you.
Shona Nunan:It's an energy that goes out.
Sarah Monk:So, you went traveling.
Shona Nunan:Yep. And then I came back to college, and lo and behold, there was Michael. He was so naughty. I just fell I fell over, rolled over. I was like well, first of all, I thought he was my very best friend.
Shona Nunan:And everybody else knew before me that I was just besotted by this guy. Anyway, one day, he touched my arm as we're going across the road to our to our history lesson, and, yeah, it was all sparks. It was amazing. I was really shocked. But he came from another college, and he was a bit of a rebel too.
Shona Nunan:And he'd come from a really free college. He was free. So Michael's work was all about freedom and and expressing himself and and real play, really, and I was very serious. So the 2 of us together have really, influenced each other along the way. I really needed his his aspect of lightness and joy.
Shona Nunan:And when I say lightness, it's not light, it's just that he he plays, he moves things along with the joy of what he does.
Sarah Monk:So he's been a big influence.
Shona Nunan:So straight away, there we were at college, and straight away I got pregnant. I don't know how dumb I was, but I was. So our life started really fast after college. First of all, we really tried to be really good. Michael straightaway went and got a job working as a teacher, and, I became the house person, and we knew that we were gonna break up within months.
Shona Nunan:We just knew it. It just wasn't dreams. We had just had all these dreams. Anyway, Michael taught for 2 years, and then we decided, no, we're leaving. We're we're going to Italy.
Sarah Monk:Did you remain in Italy, or where did where did you said you were there for 8 months? Is that Carrara?
Shona Nunan:Yeah. Then we we traveled a little bit. We we had an old, Fiat, little Fiat. Fiat 750, is it? 500, yeah, and then it was a 750.
Shona Nunan:And we had Jake in the back on a on a bit of a sheepskin, and he had his Lego, and he played in the back as we traveled around Europe. We ended up getting to London, to Ireland, and then we came back to Amsterdam, and then we hopped on an old sea trader and went up to the Northern Islands. It was beautiful. And then we ran out of money completely.
Sarah Monk:So back to Australia?
Shona Nunan:So back to Australia? Then back to Australia. And and there we stayed for quite a few years, getting ourselves organized, having studios. We will live with Michael's old lecturer. He challenged every single thought we had.
Shona Nunan:He was amazing. He was very significant in making us the artist we are. We we think, probably because of him, he was just amazing.
Sarah Monk:Great. So let's jump forward then. Pietrasanta, how long have you been here? Tell me tell me of this section of life when the kid the boys were grown up. Like, how why did you come back again to Italy, and how did your work progress?
Shona Nunan:Well, we've been coming back over the years, doing artist residencies and just loving it and dreaming, of course, dreaming that we're gonna come here and live. But it was a hard thing to organize, and you think you gotta keep the kids in school, but anyway, we kept taking them out. Because, hey, they chose you too. That's right. Oh, God.
Shona Nunan:No conscience. Anyway, finally, we made a decision one day when we came over to one of our collector's birthday parties in Lucca. She had this fantastic international birthday party in a gorgeous villa, really romantic. It was just beautiful. We were sitting on the walls of Lucca.
Shona Nunan:You know, you've you've so full of feeling and impassioned by the love of what you're experiencing. 6 months we said, we're coming back, we're gonna buy something in those hills. Our collector told us that Bagni di Lucca was the place to be. So we were convinced that's where we were gonna go. At that party, we got a fantastic commission to do a big horse and rider for me, and that that horse and rider basically paid for a little cottage up in the hills above Bagni Di Lucca.
Shona Nunan:Sole was 14 at the time, and Jacob was 21. And they they came over, of course, with us. Sole would do correspondence from school. Australia has long distance education, so he's able to do that. And it made him very creative too, though he was very lonely.
Sarah Monk:Is that because Australia is such a big country?
Shona Nunan:Yeah, that's right. Because there's all the desert communities and people living out in the whoop whoops. We can't get schooling everywhere. So we started getting our work cast, and we ended up buying studios down in the valley. And I started using the foundries in Pietrasanta at that time, so 17 years ago.
Shona Nunan:So I've been coming here for 17 years.
Sarah Monk:So tell me about the work you were doing then. You mentioned a horse and a rider. Is is was that, a theme for a time?
Shona Nunan:My horse and riders are a theme, actually, in my work because I regard them as the journey. They signify to me the journey of life, and I often do a horse and rider at one of the plateaus of my life. And sometimes you feel like you've arrived somewhere. You've arrived and you're looking down over the valley and you feel grand, because you've just achieved something. So you're looking down over the valley and you feel abundant.
Shona Nunan:It's a really beautiful time. So there's a piece I called Arrival. Another piece I called The Quiet. It was a time of really quiet rest and reflection. It's it's a beautiful reflective piece, strong.
Shona Nunan:The horses initially were really quite thin, and the riders quite big over the horses, dominating. But as time has gone on, my horses have got bigger, and my riders have become more in tune with the horses, more connected. It's really strange, but I I really feel like it's it's probably how my own journey has progressed. So my horses now are really strong. I feel like they're like the vehicle of life, you know.
Shona Nunan:It's like that energy that you have, the universal energy. And so I feel like the horse is is like that. And at first, I was out of touch with the horse, I feel. That they weren't strong. They're beautiful, fleeting things, but you hardly could grasp them.
Shona Nunan:Now they're big, strong. They're they're on the ground, they're gonna take you where you wanna go. And I I have absolute faith in life that all the things that I need happen for me. I really believe in it. And I think that's what's happened with the horses, that they've become big, and I've become less significant, you know.
Shona Nunan:Your ego goes. The rider for me was always about the ego.
Sarah Monk:So what about now? What are you working on now?
Shona Nunan:Along the way, I've become more interested in the internal. I love the inner energy, so I work with that a lot now. We're living in France. We're in this beautiful valley, which is really ancient. There's all these caves where ancient people used to live.
Shona Nunan:I feel like I'm dealing with archetypal man, the deeper man. It's like he he exists in the landscape. And so I I think I'm just trying to get to that inner person all the time. So I'm doing stellar figures. The stellar is like a marking stone of life, often depicting the part of the road, the journey for the road, or it's a memorial for a death, or that that solemn marking place.
Shona Nunan:And I feel like it's really important to remember that, because it's about the deeper motives of why we live. So it's about the inner man, you know, why we live. It goes really fast. You're here in a flash. It's really good to understand why you're here and what you're doing.
Shona Nunan:Ancient man always had archetypal images that that they would put up, you know, like the fertility, the woman. She was really about fertility, about the seasons, about being in balance with life. So that was a bit of a journey to embrace being a woman and coming to Europe. Women love being women. They really take it on, even with all the the social mores that go on.
Shona Nunan:The women are really women. They're proud of it. They love being feminine. Whatever they are, it's a great thing. So that's helped me, and I really love the ancient stuff where women are embraced for something deeper.
Shona Nunan:And and and I love the warrior too, and that's the male element. The warrior is really important too, because he's the destroyer of old things, so they're all archetypes that ancient people have used, and I wanna use them too, because they're still relevant today.
Sarah Monk:So thanks to Shona Nunan. You can see her work on our Instagram, nunan.cartwright, or on her website, nunan -cartwright.com, where you'll find online exhibitions of her work on the theme of Ancestors and Woman. For photographs of all the work discussed today, follow our Instagram or visit our website, materiallyspeaking.com, where you can also join our mailing list to hear about upcoming episodes. Editorial thanks to Guy Dowsett.