Art Unmasked

Shem was born in Tottenham, North London. His mother’s heritage includes ancestry from Maroon communities of rebel slaves and runaways who lived in the mountainous interior of Jamaica.

Shem started painting in 2014. He successfully staged his first shows in 2018 and 2019 in disused premises where he lived as a property guardian, including a fish and chip shop in Clapham and a bookmaker’s in Streatham. In June 2020, he exhibited “We are in the Future”, a painted billboard in Old Street, as part of a programme of installations curated by Trix Mendez and Outside the Zone. He had his first solo show, ‘When The Sun Falls Out The Sky’, at the Hoxton Gallery, Shoreditch, London, between November and December 2020.

Since then, without losing his sense of urgency, he has been working at a range of scales, including a whole wall on Dereham Place in Shoreditch. This was a collaboration with Mr Doodle -‘Rock Paper Wizards' - a project that became a series of 1,000 prints sold in aid of the Ben Raemers Foundation.

His second solo show, “Fine Art'', was held in South Kensington, London, during March 2022. It featured a whole collection of work made across two studios in Dalston, Hackney. The show was acclaimed a critical success. His work is in numerous private collections around the world from Seoul to San Francisco.

Shem performs with Cut With, an alternative hip hop group. He now lives and works in Bow, East London.

@shem_ahl