Shama Shams
Seattle, WA
Seattle-based mixed media artist and writer exploring memory, migration, and belonging through layered photographic transfers.
Message
Shama Shams is a Seattle-based mixed media artist, writer, and storyteller whose work explores memory, identity, and the layered experience of belonging. Working primarily with photographic transfer, paint, and texture, she creates pieces that blur the boundaries between image and emotion, documentation and interpretation. Her practice is rooted in the belief that what we remember and how we remember it is shaped as much by absence and fragmentation as it is by clarity.
Drawing from her experiences as an immigrant and a lifelong observer of human behavior, Shams is interested in the quiet, often overlooked moments that carry deeper narratives. Her work reflects a tension between visibility and obscurity, inviting viewers to engage with what lies beneath the surface. Through layering and disruption, she transforms her photographs into textured, tactile pieces that evoke both fragility and resilience.
Whether through visual art, writing, or teaching, Shams’s work centers on connection between past and present, self and community, and the visible and the unseen.
Statement
My work explores memory, identity, and the ways we construct belonging across time and place. Working primarily in mixed media and photographic transfer, I use images I have taken as a starting point than disrupt, layer, and reassemble them to reflect the instability of memory and perception.
The process of transfer is central to my practice. Images are lifted from their original context, altered through texture and fragmentation, and reimagined into something both familiar and unsettled. Faces blur, surfaces crack, and layers obscure and reveal simultaneously. I am drawn to the tension between what is visible and what is felt, the quiet, often unspoken narratives that exist beneath the surface.
While some of my work draws from personal and cultural histories, including my experiences of migration, I am less interested in documenting specific places and more interested in what those places hold traces of labor, absence, resilience, and time. My work moves between the personal and the collective, inviting viewers to find their own points of entry.
Layering is both a visual and conceptual approach in my work. I build surfaces using photographic transfers, paint, and texture to create pieces that feel fragile yet enduring. This layering reflects how we navigate the world, what we choose to reveal, what we conceal, and how we adapt ourselves in different environments. There is often an undercurrent of tension between vulnerability and protection.
Ultimately, my work is an invitation to pause and reflect. Rather than offering resolution, I am interested in creating space for ambiguity and connection. I want viewers to consider their own relationship to memory, identity, and place, and to question what is held onto, what is lost, and what is transformed over time.