shying a waytowards an aesthetics of shyness
2022–present
Shying a Way is an ongoing artistic research project exploring the aesthetics of shyness. It began inside of a long-term collaborative project aimed at developing a Nordic/Pan-African studio. I was seeking a form and substrate for this work and found myself drawn to shyness as an often-maligned way of being and from a curiosity about what forms of knowing—and not knowing—might be held within its resistant posture.
the School of Shying a Way
One manifestation of this research has been The School of Shying a Way, a collective space for exploring shyness as artistic practice and experimental pedagogy.
The School emerged through a multi-year collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki (where I work and teach) and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. I co-directed the collaborative project with CCA Lagos’ executive and creative director Oyindamola Faithful. The collaboration brought together artists and curators connected to Nordic and African contexts and two histories of experimental artistic pedagogy: Àsìkò Art School and the Nordic/Baltic Studio for Continued Engagement. It was developed within the Finland–Africa Platform for Innovation (FAPI).
Rather than establishing a curriculum around shyness, I asked members of the research group to bring offerings to two gatherings around shyness (one in Lagos and another in Helsinki). These offerings took the form of collective activities emerging from their artistic and curatorial practices through which we could wonder together. The offerings began not from knowing but from wondering, trusting what each person was drawn toward in relation to shyness, even when it appeared strange, peripheral or insignificant.
The first gathering, On Being Just Shy of Lagos, took place at G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos in 2023. The research continued with On Being Just Shy of Helsinki in 2024, where five workshops were distributed among small arts organisations across Helsinki.
I oriented the research group, to our work developing the aesthetics of shyness, through the example of the shyness of trees. “Crown shyness” describes a phenomenon in which certain trees alter their growth in relation to those around them, leaving space between their crowns. This meeting without touching involves restraint: growing differently, choosing not to grow, leaving space, while maintaining a subtle awareness of others.
From this starting point, over the course of the two gatherings, three interconnected understandings of shyness emerged: shyness as a resistant posture; “just shy of” as an uncertain relational position; and “shying a-way” as a form of movement.
To be just shy of something is to be near it without fully arriving. It suggests a position alongside, near or by a subject. Shying a-way extends this positionality into movement: a way of moving, attending and being-with that resists demands for complete visibility, certainty, growth or arrival.
The research asks what these qualities might offer as an aesthetic proposition. What forms, relations and ways of attending emerge when we leave space around things? What happens when uncertainty, hesitation, indirectness, partial visibility, misunderstanding and not-knowing are understood not as deficits to overcome, but as conditions through which aesthetic experience and knowledge might be produced?