Time, Material, and Democracy in Action: The Art of Randy Shull

Time, in Randy Shull’s work, is not a unit to be measured but a condition to be inhabited. It unfolds through attention, physical commitment, and the slow intelligence of materials responding to touch, gravity, and use. The exhibition and publication I’ve Never Worn a Watch mark a pivotal moment in Shull’s practice, not as a summation, but as a deepening. These works gather decades of inquiry into form, process, and lived experience while opening onto a field in which painting, craft, architecture, and cultural exchange remain suspended in productive tension. What is at stake is not simply a new body of work, but a reorientation of what it means to make art over time. Shull’s hammock-based paintings propose an ethics of attention rooted in indeterminacy, reciprocity, and material responsiveness. They resist speed, certainty, and closure, aligning themselves with a lineage that runs through Black Mountain College and its radical pedagogical vision, where art was understood not as an object category but as a mode of living.

Democracy in Action “Democracy in Action,” a phrase often associated with Black Mountain College, resonates here not as theme but as structure. Authority in Shull’s work is distributed. No single element, whether artist, material, gesture, or tradition, claims primacy. Agency circulates among hammock makers, woven fibers, paint, gravity, and bodily action.

This is democracy as practice rather than representation. It is a system of negotiation rather than control. Time itself becomes democratic, shaped by responsiveness rather than regulation. The works model a way of being as much as a way of making, advocating attentiveness, reciprocity, and sustained engagement. Toward an Expanded Field: I’ve Never Worn a Watch articulates a practice attuned to indeterminacy, grounded in material reciprocity, and oriented toward an expanded understanding of time. These works refuse the autonomy of the art object, situating themselves instead within networks of labor, tradition, and lived experience. They do not offer answers so much as hold open questions about how form emerges, how materials remember, and how art might function as a lived experiment. Suspended between painting and architecture, craft and abstraction, history and invention, Shull’s hammock works invite viewers into a field of attention where looking slows, thinking follows, and time is felt rather than counted.

-Jeff Arnal

Executive Director of the

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center