For the past twenty years, I have worked between the Yucatán of Mexico and Asheville, North Carolina—two places with deep histories of making and material tradition. In the tropi- cal climate of the Yucatán, the hammock is an essential part of daily life, suspending the body in weightlessness, offering rest, and providing relief from the heat. The hammocks I work with are handmade by local weavers, and their knowledge, skill, and labor form the foundational layer of my paintings. 

I work with these woven hammocks as a ground for painting. I think of these works as paintings, not textiles. They invert the traditional relationship between support and medium: rather than the canvas holding the paint, the paint holds the woven hammock in form, be- coming the structure of the piece. My process is materially direct. I work on the floor, pouring paint into the open weave. Gravity, absorption, and tension determine how the pigment moves, saturates, and accumulates. 

Unlike canvas, which presents a continuous surface, the woven grid breaks and redirects the flow of color. Pigment does not sit on a unified plane but disperses across strands, gaps, and intersections. Color is interrupted, pooled, and suspended—at once absorbed and held in tension. It becomes structural, binding the fibers while remaining visibly contingent, its edges defined as much by absence as by presence. 

What matters to me is not perfection but presence. Each piece carries the trace of its mak- ing—the weight and movement of paint as it saturates and binds the fibers, the adjustments, and the moments of uncertainty that arise in the process. These are not flaws; they are the work itself. 

I am interested in how time becomes visible—through the notion of the siesta and its rela- tionship to the body. Time settles into the surface and structure of the work, held in the weave, in the movement of color, and in the accumulation of decisions embedded in each piece. 

- Randy Shull 

Represented by Alejandra Topete Gallery, Ciudad de México, Mexico https://alejandratopetegallery.com/
@alejandratopete_gallery
randy.shull@gmail.com / @shull.randy / +1 828.216.1337