Materializing Moments – An Exclusive Interview with Shelby Donnelly

How Ritual and Memory Shape Donnelly’s Vision

Shelby Donnelly, interdisciplinary artist and Wear To Wall® founder, reveals her journey of merging art, ritual, and sustainable fashion to capture transient moments, enriched by global experiences and creative experimentation.

Shelby Donnelly is a visionary whose work blurs the lines between art, fashion, and storytelling. Her creations breathe life into textiles, transforming everyday materials into vessels of ritual and introspection. Donnelly’s interdisciplinary approach merges the tactile with the ephemeral, creating a striking balance between form and narrative. As the founder of Wear To Wall®, she views each garment as a distinct artwork, integrating sustainability and individuality into every piece. Her creations embody an alchemy of the personal and universal, invoking themes of spirituality, memory, and the intimate traces we leave behind.

Donnelly’s art has graced the walls of renowned institutions such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Barnes Foundation, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, where her works evoke a powerful sense of transience and ritual. Her immersive installations and wearable art pieces invite audiences to experience fleeting moments captured in fabric, print, and video. Through her travels and residencies across Morocco, Paris, and New York, Donnelly has honed a unique artistic voice that resonates across borders, time, and media. In this exclusive interview with WOWwArt Magazine, Donnelly delves into her artistic journey, sharing insights into her process, her inspirations, and the philosophies that underpin her extraordinary body of work.

Shelby Donnelly’s work transforms textiles into narratives that bridge art and life, evoking profound themes of memory, spirituality, and ritual.

How do your interdisciplinary skills in printmaking, textiles, and video shape the narrative you aim to convey in your installations?

Fabric plays a central role in my practice, serving as a surface for printed textures and illustrations and as the material for costumes and sculptural objects. Video complements this by providing context and adding a temporal dimension to the narrative. It serves as a storytelling medium and a way to document performances that might otherwise remain ephemeral.

Your work explores humanity’s relationship with ritual, ceremony, and spirituality. How do you integrate these themes into the everyday materials you use, like fabric and paper? I consider the element of water to be spiritual. Paper virtually dissolves in water, while fabric gets damp and weighted. The alchemic process of materials’ response to a gesture or action is a ritual unto itself. I enjoy making up rituals that commemorate the passing of time or as a marker of a wrinkle, pinch, squint, or dance.

You mention a desire to “materialize gestures” and make fleeting moments tangible. Could you share an example of how this concept comes to life in one of your recent projects?

This month I made a garment called Morning Ritual dress. On the skirt of the garment, there is a fabric kettle with fabric coming out of its spout. Every morning, I make coffee for my partner and me, and I continuously neglect to stop the black wrought iron kettle from overboiling. It is the first gesture of the day. My neglect of the kettle and the kettle’s dramatic response, yelling, “Wake up! Begin Again!” The top of the dress is a pre-loved white V-neck t-shirt. I responded to any stains by washing them, pinching the remaining ones, and then sewing the pinches to hold them in place.

How did your experience in artist residencies, especially in places like Paris and Morocco, influence your creative process and the themes you explore?

A reset occurs when I live in a new neighborhood or city. So typically, it’s creatively fruitful for me to be somewhere new and try to find myself there. I get a lot out of exploring my first impression of a place. It challenges my sense of self. That combination makes for a new aesthetic, new signs, and symbols while realizing the aspects of myself that stay consistent.

In your practice, you reference magic and play with the idea of non-commitment in your work. How does this concept of “now you see it, now you don’t” manifest visually in your pieces? A younger version of myself felt that commitment of any kind was when magic and play died. In the past year, I’ve made the biggest commitment of my life so far, and that is to help my partner through advanced cancer, and my art is shifting around that commitment and responding to it. Performance is the ultimate turnstile of “now you see me, now you don’t.” In my work, there is a tension between wanting to be seen, being found, and wanting to disappear altogether. I fantasize about the traces left behind. How what those traces be materialized? Who’d find them? Would it matter?

The idea of haunting, both in terms of memory and physical space, is prominent in your work. What draws you to these themes of liminality, and what do they represent in your artistic journey?

Regrets are a kind of haunting. Looking at life with squinted eyes, you see a series of blended fleeting moments. The feeling of being in the present, you are aware that the moment is slipping, and you’ll never get it back. How as you are living, you are gaining experiences and losing time at the same moment. Being aware of loss. The hope of “someday” while understanding that you might not get there.

EDITOR’S HIGHLIGHTS