Shonagh Short is a Bolton based social practice artist, who has been co-creating arts projects with communities since 2014. She is interested in how socially engaged arts can create spaces of care and make visible the networks and values that build community. Shonagh uses everyday experiences as materials, in order to unpick distinctions between high and low art, cultural value and social status. She likes to create participatory, playful and performative interactions – a walk, a meal, an exchange – that bring care and attention to those moments of connection that we might otherwise overlook as ordinary.

In the last few years Shonagh has completed commissions for FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool; Manchester International Festival; the Turnpike Gallery in Leigh; Barrow Full, Super Slow Way (Blackburn); Walkcreate and the Marks and Spencer’s Archive. She is currently working on a practice led PhD with the In Certain Places research centre at the University of Central Lancashire, exploring a situated socially engaged art practice as a form of care.