Born in 1947, Shannon spent her childhood moving from place to place. She found herself living in boisterous construction camps in the Pacific Northwest, in a fishing village at the mouth of the Columbia river, a boarding house on the plains of Montana, and happily, for a short while, in a beloved brick house in Memphis, Tennessee. Very shy and impressionable, she loved books, reading Dickens, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, but, even more, she was always drawn into the secret lives of things, playing with and creating arrangements with whatever was at hand -- driftwood, iron scraps, the objects found on an old dresser. She explains, "Parallel to our lives are the lives of things. Just like us, they have their own journeys through time, in some ways staying the same, in some ways changing. The little German girl who wanted a Dresden ballerina got old and died, but the ballerina is still here -- maybe she's missing a few fingers that got chipped off."

As an artist, Shannon started off as a watercolorist, winning awards and showing with the National Academy of Design in New York and the San Diego Watercolor Society, among others. In the 1980s, inspired by such artists as Fra Angelica, Francis Bacon, and especially Joseph Cornell, Shannon began to create many-layered assemblages, taking part in group and one-woman shows at the Dickson Art Center, UCLA, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Whittier College, and numerous galleries in Los Angeles.

Shannon's current work, incorporating ceramic figures, mosaic tiles, plates, cups and saucers, is clearly an outgrowth and continuation of her previous interests. Reflecting her fascination with what might be called "transitoriness", how things change over time, these lamps, tables, chairs and fountains explore how found objects can actually rediscover new life and beauty under her hands.

Shannon Landis Hansen