When you first encounter the name shaun kardinal, it’s easy to mistake him for another artist of conventional forms. Yet, what greets you instead is a rich and distinctive language of thread, paper, disruption and reconstruction. Kardinal’s practice is at once poetic and radical, grounded in humility yet ambitious in scale: he takes found ephemera such as postcards, prints and discarded paper and intervenes—through embroidery, weaving, collage, and modular installation—to expose new tensions, reveal hidden geometry, and invite reflection on time, perception, and creative labour.
Early Life, Training, and Entry into the Art World
Shaun Kardinal was born and raised in suburban California. Early on, his interests spanned multiple media. After finishing high school, he relocated to Seattle—an environment that would form the crucible for much of his artistic development.
In his initial years in the arts, Kardinal gravitated toward photography and ran a frame shop and gallery hybrid space in Seattle. That space doubled as a not-for-profit gallery, allowing him to engage with local artists and exhibit his own photographic work. Over time, he grew restless with the conventional modes of exhibition and the burden of constant output. He began experimenting with combining painted marks or printed forms on found paper, then stitching over them—transforming the surface in a more intimate and material way.
An important dimension of Kardinal’s trajectory is that he also developed professional skills in web development and design. From 2013 to 2014, he served as Digital Media Manager at the Frye Art Museum. These dual capacities—as maker and as infrastructure builder—allowed him to envision not just his own work but also platforms and collaborative formats that might challenge how exhibitions are typically structured.
By the time he fully embraced his signature practice of embroidery and collage, he already understood both the artistic and institutional ecosystems around him.
Core Aesthetic and Methodology
One of Kardinal’s guiding maxims is “creating form from repeating parts—one from many, many from one.” In essence, he is deeply invested in modular thinking: incremental gestures accumulate; the smallest stitch or alteration may generate a ripple in perception. His pieces often possess rhythmic structures—grids, mandalas, geometric patterning—that emerge through serial repetition of small units.
A central material substrate for his work is found paper: old postcards, photographs, surplus prints and discarded sheets from free piles or street-side give-aways. He embraces the existing textures, images, fading and marks of age, then intervenes through embroidery, drawing, cutting or weaving to transform them. These interventions do not erase history; rather, they overlay a second order of time, so that beneath the thread lies the trace of “what was.”
In several bodies of work, Kardinal intentionally subjects pieces to sunlight or environmental exposure before or after stitching, permitting photodegradation, fading and shifting colour to register as part of the work. This extended temporal dimension becomes integral, reinforcing themes of entropy, impermanence and the complex interrelation of presence and absence.
Kardinal’s work often invites paradox: clarity within interference, pattern emerging from noise, layering that both obscures and reveals. His art prompts viewers to negotiate multiple registers of vision—to ask questions rather than demand answers. He is interested in how meaning can arise amid contradictions.
Major Series and Bodies of Work
While Kardinal’s oeuvre continues to evolve, certain series and exhibitions are central to understanding his artistic arc.
Present Tense (2020)
This exhibition at J. Rinehart Gallery marked one of Kardinal’s more cohesive bodies of work. He produced embroidered collages, woven-postcard quilts and manipulated paper constructions that highlight the tension between fragility and structure. The title suggests a focus on immediacy—the state of being in now.
Deviations (2020)
Created during the early months of the global pandemic, the Deviations series reflects a shift outward—or perhaps inward—in response to profound disruption. The works maintain his signature stitching and modular interventions, but the formal logic feels more unsettled, more questioning of stable geometry.
Planes (2019)
In Planes, Kardinal explores layered dimensionality. The series often uses embroidery on paper to induce a sense of planes folding, overlapping, shifting vantage points. The combination of drawing and stitching reinforces optical ambiguity.
Light Work (2021–22) and Photodegradation Series
In this more recent series, Kardinal turned to photodegradation—using light exposure as an active agent in the work’s transformation. He weaves the fading or discolouration of paper into his compositional logic, making light itself a collaborator.
Alterations and Embroidered Postcards
Perhaps one of his more iconic and public-facing projects is his Alterations series: vintage postcards embroidered with geometric and prismatic motifs. These small-format works have been shown widely, sometimes arranged in clusters to become installations. They embody the essence of his practice—intervention in intimate scale, magnified by repetition.
Exhibitions, Recognition, and Institutional Presence
Shaun Kardinal is represented by J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle. His solo show This Is How We Learn ran from June to July 2023 at J. Rinehart, continuing his investigations into temporal degradation, contradiction and visual layering. Prior exhibitions also include Present Tense (2020) at the same gallery. His work has also been part of Art on Paper in New York in 2023.
Kardinal has received support through grants from Artist Trust and the 4Culture fund. In 2019, he obtained funding for a body of embroidered paper work to assist with framing costs. He has also held roles in various Seattle-based artist-run initiatives: he was a member of the SOIL gallery, participated in Crawl Space Gallery and co-founded Some Space Gallery.
His work is catalogued in the Washington State Arts Collection; for example, a piece titled Perspective (2019) is installed at North Hill Elementary in Des Moines, Washington.
Two important curatorial and platform-based projects reflect his belief that art is not merely object-making but process, exchange and transformation.
TURN
In this year-long collaborative project, a single piece is passed monthly between 12 artists. Each artist separately alters the piece, exhibits it briefly, then hands it off. The emphasis is on relinquishing control, embracing transformation and engaging process as the trajectory.
Forward
A natural evolution of the TURN model, Forward asks artists to receive works, transform them while retaining an abstract connection to what they inherited, and then return them to exhibition. The cycle continues. It emphasises impermanence, ceding ego and collaborative becoming.
These platforms reflect Kardinal’s belief that artworks are not fixed monuments but living entities that evolve with context and contact.
Philosophical Underpinnings and Thematic Currents
A persistent concern in Kardinal’s work is temporality—not merely as backdrop but as generative force. The surface of paper, the stretch of thread, sunlight’s slow corrosion—all are agents in his compositions. He gives time agency: the fading, decay and transformation become part of the visual narrative.
Kardinal’s interventions rarely obliterate what came before; rather they converse with the inherited surface. His stitching listens to the existing image or mark, inserting geometry, thread and repetition in response to what the substrate offers. In this sense, his work is deeply respectful of prior layers.
Through TURN and Forward, Kardinal foregrounds the ethics and aesthetics of collaboration. The relinquishing of control, the acceptance of mutation, the weaving together of multiple authorship are deeply embedded in his curatorial ethos.
He enjoys creating works that resist reductive reading. He allows for optical tension, interference and contradiction—his pieces often shift and require the viewer to negotiate differing registers of seeing. The work does not yield a single “meaning”; it encourages tension, openness and reflection.
In more recent works, blended into his formal lexicon are concerns about ecological precarity, layered anxiety about modern life and the fracturing of interior states. His art invites reflection on how we perceive complexity, noise, collapse and continuation.
Challenges, Innovations, and Critical Reception
Because much of Kardinal’s work uses embroidery, stitch, collage and found materials, it sometimes stands at the boundary of what is considered “fine art” versus “craft.” Yet his conceptual rigour, scale and deployment in gallery settings challenge any simplistic categorisation of his output. Critics and interviewers have acknowledged that his medium choices are radical precisely because of their humility and tactile intimacy.
Some of his works deliberately incorporate light damage or fading. This raises challenging questions about preservation: how to display, conserve or archive works whose shifting state is part of the concept. Some may change over time, and that mutability is embraced.
Kardinal’s work sits between the static object and the ongoing process. His curatorial platforms explicitly undermine the idea of singular finished works. This can unsettle conventional gallery metrics—sales, editions and permanence—which he seems to accept as part of the territory.
At J. Rinehart Gallery, recent works by Kardinal have been made available for purchase, with listed prices ranging from lower hundreds to mid-five-figure sums. His work has drawn favourable attention for its poetic sensibility, material sensitivity and embrace of risk. While not yet a household name in mainstream art criticism, he is steadily carving a space of influence in contemporary paper- and stitch-based practice.
How to Encounter His Work
Visit gallery exhibitions of shaun kardinal through J. Rinehart Gallery when they mount solo or group shows. Observe how small works such as embroidered postcards may be shown in clusters; these modular units often carry latent power when aggregated. Look carefully: beyond the immediate visual geometry, attend to the residual traces—fading, ghost images, abrasion, bleeding of thread. Consider the curatorial platforms TURN or Forward not as side projects but as essential to understanding his practice philosophy. Reflect on how his work positions itself in conversation with both craft and fine art, especially in our current renewed interest in materiality, tactility and remnant surfaces.
Conclusion
In an era increasingly dominated by digital image proliferation, clean minimalism and spectacle, shaun kardinal’s work is a counterpoint: grounded, tactile, humble, ambiguous and unpredictable. He resists finality, foregrounds process, embraces ephemerality and invites participation—whether by fellow artists in his collaborative platforms or by viewers willing to slow down and trace threads.
His work helps us re-learn how to look: to see not just images but the tensions between past and present, surface and thread, intention and entropy. He reminds us that even small, discarded media such as a postcard or a photograph might be sites of resurrection, slow revelation and poetic transformation.
