David: A Memoir explores the intersection of art, pain, and healing. Local author and artist, Shayam Korey Steckle, reflects on how creative expression can become a tool for overcoming struggle.
David: A Memoir explores your journey through art, pain, and creativity. When did you realize that art could be the way through your struggles?
I began realizing that art would be the way through my struggles after I chose to incorporate an image of my bloody hand with gravel in a wound from an unauthorized police stop I encountered. The image taken by my mother moments after the assault occurred sat in the bottom of a desk drawer of my childhood bedroom for many years before I made the decisive decision to expose the all-too-common police brutality against minorities. I created a collage piece for a commissioned art exhibit for the Guelph Civic Museum in 2016 with the image. By creating with my pain, I fully understood the power of messaging and calling out authority and injustice in my community and abroad.
Describe the connection between art and survival? How does your art reflect past struggles and act as a tool for your ongoing healing journey?
The connection between art and survival runs deep. I was silenced from expressing my feelings for so long due to racially motivated physical and verbal attacks daily from kindergarten to Grade 11.
I utilize art as a vehicle for messaging. I channel the pain, shame, guilt, misery and self-hatred from the decade or so of abuse at the hands of classmates now into a positive yet thought provoking manner. Creating is the ultimate form of rebellion. To reclaim my childhood and immerse myself in activities that pulled me through and upward from the formative years till now.
My art is a reflection of my current life from a mirror held up to the past. In fragments that I am piecing back together. Repurposing and reassigning. Controlling what I can and knowing what I cannot is key. Allowing my life to live through my artwork and writing is essential for me because it is all linked to self-expression.
Collage seems to be a very important medium for you. What draws you to this medium?
I am drawn to the medium of collage because it involves other mediums. I can implement acrylic abstract paintings or landscape photography into a piece. I first scan my existing body of work or I create an abstract painting or take a pre-dawn photograph. Found materials and periodicals are of value as well to myself in the process of selecting colours, shapes and information that I wish to either magnify or conceal in my work.
You also mention that collage is an intuitive and instinctive process, can you elaborate more on that?
The first steps are plotted and planned. I decide what magazines and what backgrounds to use in the work. I go by feel and rhythm and flow. I am a vessel. A conduit. I tap into the creative force within me that I have fostered, nurtured and honed. In releasing this energy, I enter into a trance-like state. I find it to be very similar to when I’m mountain biking or surfing.
If there’s one key takeaway from your memoir and your art that you hope others can apply to their own lives, what would it be?
My art and memoir both contain a message of fearlessness. Both in the reckless and destructive nature of how I have lived my life documented in my first published book and also in the process of creating in the medium of collage. I tear, rip and destroy. I repurpose from found materials and establish my own aesthetic style with my sense of interpretation through expression.
I would say be fearless. Take chances and risks.
What’s next for you creatively or personally?
Currently my collage work is on exhibit at Sugo on Surrey in Guelph. In March my exhibit opens at High Life in Downtown Guelph for two months. I will be exhibiting my work in Athen’s Greece this September for The Platforms Project. I have begun writing Volume 2 of my Memoir and I’m in talks with an academy award winning documentarian to work on the memoir and bring my life to the screen.
David (Shayam): A Memoir Volume 2 will be published in September 2025.
My poetry will be published in December 2025.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
