shannon bulrice
I make art for the people who know something is wrong. The ones who are overwhelmed, exhausted, grieving things that don’t have names yet — and still showing up anyway. You are not alone. That’s what everything I make is trying to say.
My name is Shannon Bulrice. I’m a visual artist, author, and civic advocate based in Long Beach, California — and I’ve been making things professionally since I was 18 years old.
Over several decades, I built a career in design and visual communication. Contract work, freelance work, the kind of career that lives in the unglamorous and essential middle of the creative economy. I became fluent in Adobe tools, in systems, in the discipline of making other people’s visions legible. And somewhere in all of it, I lost the fire for making art for myself.
Midjourney gave it back.
In 2022 I started exploring generative AI as a tinkerer. What followed was four years of obsessive iteration — nearly 200,000 images, thousands of hours of experimentation, a visual language built from the ground up through relentless creative decision-making. For my neurodivergent brain, this technology was something traditional mediums rarely offered: a system that responds in real time, rewards lateral thinking, and removes the friction between idea and image. I believe AI tools are particularly powerful for non-typical brains, and I say so loudly.
For the first two years I kept my generative practice completely separate from my professional toolkit — not out of principle, but out of protection. I had found something that felt alive and I wasn’t willing to risk losing it to the tools I associated with work. When I finally brought Adobe back in, everything changed. Now every piece moves through the same deliberate sequence: Midjourney for generation and iteration, Magnific AI for finishing and upscaling, Photoshop and Illustrator for the final layer of craft that makes it unambiguously mine.
But here’s the thing that matters most about my process: my prompts are not the art. My existing body of work is. Every piece I make is built from a curated library of my own previously created images, fed back into the generation process as character and style references. The figures that emerge — those specific proportions, that quality of melancholy, that tension between the grotesque and the tender — exist because I have spent years making decisions that accumulated into a visual language that now teaches the machine what Shannon looks like. Remove my foundational artwork and the results are unrecognizable as mine.
That’s not a workflow. That’s authorship.
artist statement
My figures are monstrous and maternal. Defiant and exhausted. Wrong by someone else’s definition and exactly right by their own.
They come from somewhere specific. I grew up surrounded by big-eyed children on the walls of my grandfather’s house. I was raised by my grandmother in a home shaped by mental illness and guilt, and by the heavy beauty of Catholic iconography — all that contradiction of faith, love, and control. I became a mother at sixteen and learned early what both tenderness and survival look like. These experiences live in my work. The way light bends around pain. The way beauty grows in unlikely places. The way something can be strange and sacred at the same time.
My work is dark pop surrealism — but darkness is not the point. The point is accuracy. This is what it feels like to be a person with values right now, in this specific moment in history. The cruelty is loud. The people who know it’s wrong are overwhelmed. I make art that reflects them back to themselves with dignity instead of shame.
My art and my advocacy are not separate. They are the same argument made in different languages. I am the creator of Softcore Anarchy, an artbook documenting this visual universe. I am the author of The Non-Abusive System, a governance framework rooted in human dignity and accountability. I am a civic voice, a democratic one, and I believe art remains one of the few spaces where the truth can still be told plainly.
My work has been exhibited internationally, including recognition at the AI Design Awards in Barcelona.
Your grief is not a weakness. It is evidence that you are paying attention.
If any of this lands for you — the art, the work, the framework, or just the feeling of it — I’d love to connect.
You can find my prints at softcoreanarchy.com, my artbook at the link above, and my daily world at @momhugsss on Instagram.
Say hello. I mean it.
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We are Transparent Like that. No Gimmicks.
