Shawn Edrington: Blueprint of Ruin

SHAWN EDRINGTON: BLUEPRINT for RUIN

"Blueprint For Ruin" explores landscapes that bear the scars of human intervention—open-pit mines, deforested terrain, and ecologically fractured sites. Rendered in cyanotype, a process historically tied to scientific illustration and architectural blueprints, Shawn Edrington’s prints present our damaged world as distilled, map-like abstractions. Lines and grids replace organic forms, offering beautifully haunting documentations—not of progress, but of extraction and erasure. Through this lens, Edrington documents more than just environmental degradation; he invites reflection on our collective complicity in ecological collapse. The works evoke obliterated forests, disrupted habitats, and fragmented ecosystems, tracing the effects of industry and expansion. In doing so, the exhibition meditates on the inadequacy of reclamation efforts to restore the lost complexity and resilience of these environments.

About the Artist Originally from Salt Lake City, Shawn Edrington studied music and visual art at Salt Lake Community College before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Printmaking, Painting, and Sculpture from Idaho State University in 2015. He completed his MFA in Visual Art at Boise State University in 2018, with an emphasis in Interdisciplinary Studio Art and Installation. He is urrently an Assistant Professor of Art at Idaho State University. Edrington’s practice spans drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and sound. His current work examines volatility within, and external to, infrastructural systems and the entanglements of human and nonhuman ecologies.