I'm Shanna. I live and work in Yzerfontein on the South African west coast, between the veld and the sea, mostly wherever there's room — at a dining table for now, with a studio in the new house coming once we've built it. I live with my mum. There are two dogs and a cat.

I'm largely self-taught. The work has been finding its way through me for a while now — dense, monochrome, sometimes botanical, sometimes more like a map of something I can't quite name. My work has shown at Site:Brooklyn Gallery in New York and was selected for the Biafarin International Awards in 2025. Mapping Cloudy Terrain is the piece I keep returning to.

I came to ink sideways. For more than a decade I dreamed of being a writer. I finally started in March 2025 — terrified but excited. A few weeks in, my corporate job ended and a classmate from school died at 43. I thought this was the moment. I had time, space, a real reason to write. But the writing was hard. It came until it didn't. My mother noticed, and made me a desk pad — to scribble down my thoughts and things, she said, and she knew how I'd always liked to doodle. I sat down to write. I started doodling instead. The doodling kept going. Pen applied in a different way. Something I hadn't known was there.

Alongside the studio, the writing has come back. Finding Wilder is a letter from the studio — for people who care about small things and slow ones. No fixed schedule; roughly once or twice a month. If the work on these walls lands for you, the letter probably will too.