You see, we're all so committed to the painstaking analysis of ourselves and the absurdity of contemporary self-management, color-coding our emotional crises and making spreadsheets out of existential dread, that we've almost failed to call up whatever roaming desires and foolish appetites are loitering in the wings, bored to death by the sterile machinery of keeping it together. Yet who among us would refuse to put a little dent in our optimized calendars and pristine habit stacks? Go down a rabbit hole or two, wander off on a sidequest, get your cards pulled three olives deep into a filthy martini?
"I come from a family of very powerful witchy women," says Shóna Slemon. "The mystical runs deep. I was trained to read tarot by a dear friend who is also a witch. It's like an internal compass revealing what I already know. It helps me attune to the creative source — that's usually where the answers are."
A single draw. The Devil lands over The World.
Shóna Slemon, Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em, 2026, acrylic on cotton canvas, 90 x 120 cm © Courtesy of the artist.
Archive of Mess, Slemon's latest solo exhibition and the culmination of Wilton Way Gallery's Irish Summer program, is a triptych of W's: witchy, wayward and boot-stomping Western. The London-based Irish artist pairs doilies and Sacred Hearts with horseshoes and pill packets; Holy Mary and Wren Boys share a table where someone's clearly laid it all out — keepsakes, vices, skinny cigs, and not the faintest urge to Marie Kondo any of it.
Across the seventeen paintings and two wooden polyptychs that make up the exhibition, Slemon spins Irish Catholic domesticity off into something of her own, mashing up Celtic paganism with the devotional lace and ecclesiastical relics of her childhood. "Being Irish predisposes you to this. We're steeped in Catholic iconography, but long before the Church took over, our Celtic pagan roots were tied to divination and seeking wisdom in the land — in water spirits, sacred trees, hawthorn, ash, gorse. Even after the Church co-opted these old traditions and deities, that instinctive attachment to symbolism, superstition, and the otherworldly survived in us. For me, it evolved into a curiosity about religious folk art and magical realism from elsewhere."
Into the mix: indulgences best left off the parish newsletter, and a streak of Wild West Americana whose appeal began as a hyper-fixation on hoss operas and cowboy culture but eventually "tapped into something much closer to home." Growing up in rural Ireland, Slemon explains, "your history is tied to the land, pastoral traditions and subsistence farming, so I've always felt drawn to those ways of life in other places that feel close to the land" — perhaps all the more so now that she lives in the city.
Portrait of Shóna Slemon © Jubbi Georgia Rose.
But beyond the escapism of that yonder frontier — its swaggering cowboys and their demimonde — it was the cowgirl, and her propensity for daredevilry, that really hooked her. Irreverent, transgressive and self-sufficient, she represents "a rejection of sanitized perfection and ideals of success. Very much in the vein of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Wanting to subvert the historically rigid, masculine trope, Slemon draws on its spirited, unbridled counterpoint: "a survivalist finding the most pleasurable, feral path through the exhaustion of modern womanhood" — though, she adds, "life as this isn't exclusive to women."
Giving in to the archetype gave her permission to lean into play and "live wide open in the middle of all the mess." Her heroines took note, sporting fresh sets of stilettos and calling the shots one pint at a time. In Mundo, even Botticelli’s Venere detours around the county line, rising from an oyster, brunette and decked out for the honky-tonk, with fish bones and scallops arranged in the fussy symmetry of a canivet.
From topless Manetian picnics on checkerboard blankets to figs and pomegranates going soft in the heat, tender at the split, Slemon reroutes familiar touchstones with the sheer liberty of laying out her inner compulsions and looping thoughts on canvas — in maroon and cornflower blue, carmine and rust, exactly as they came to her. "Painting is where I drop the mask," she says, describing it as a grounding ritual for channeling her "high-wired mental energy" and letting her imagination roam free-range. "With a lot of mental clutter up there, symbols and archetypes give that energy somewhere to go, telling a story instead of a spiral."
Shóna Slemon, Contents of a Cowgirl's Purse, 2026, acrylic on wood, 60 x 80 cm © Courtesy of the artist.
Less a mishmash than a small personal pantheon in the making, the exhibition is an unabridged archive of Slemon's messier fixations, an altar to whatever has earned a place on it. Hand-me-down tokens are made one's own — old creeds in new boots, on the bill at Slemon's feral theatre. "So much of life forces you into a rational state. When I'm painting or working with my cards, I let my unfiltered self embrace the esoteric and fantastical as perfectly normal, essential tools for modern survival."
One gets to trust what feels true, even when it refuses to be neatly filed away: vivid dreams, post-afters lore, the stray obsessions of a mind running too many tabs at once. The cards, it seems, have a fairly consistent line on the matter: "Whenever I have them read, there's usually a similar thread: stop faking, stop performing, get weirder, be softer, and make art at every chance you get." And so Archive of Mess is no average figuration outing, but a rhinestone-studded exercise in slapping bacon on a biscuit and letting your free will steer.