Today we’d like to introduce you to Shorna Haque.
Shorna, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve been an artist for as long as I remember, but my current life as primarily a figure model in Austin began pretty recently in 2024. A lot of the art that I make is based around my upbringing as a queer Bangladeshi girl who grew up in a bigger body; I like to think that, if my younger self could see the work that I make and do now, she would have felt much more seen and held. The only goal I’ve had in life was to grow up to be someone that I would have looked up to as a kid.
In high school, I was in a Studio Art program that helped me discover my love of art, modeling, and photography. Then, my freshman year of college, I met one of my dearest friends to this day, Hayden Sutherland. We both lived in the Jester dorms at UT Austin, and there we worked on multiple photography projects together, including an impromptu photoshoot we decided to do at Target. My favorite project we did together though was for a zine that focused on the aspects of pleasure and growing up in the age of the internet. I still have those photos to this day, and I’m planning to hopefully reuse some of them for a future project!
Since then, I’ve worked with many various creatives around Austin, and have made a wide selection of artwork myself that’s based on my upbringing, my body, my culture, my pleasure, my queerness, and my life as a whole. As for figure modeling, I was initially invited by a friend to model at Highland Art Collective, and before I knew it I was figure modeling regularly for over two years. A lot of people have asked me through the years on how to get started with figure modeling, and, honestly, my best advice is to just reach out and let different art collectives know that you’re available for the opportunity! I’m at the point now where different organizations will reach out to me usually once or twice a month, and I love being a muse so it’s a win-win situation.
It’s been very healing for me to not only be able to work with so many incredible creatives throughout the years but to also be able to celebrate my body and my culture by doing so as well. I struggled a lot with the intersection of being both queer and Bangladeshi growing up (along with being blessed with a curvy body), especially because when I was young most queer spaces I was in weren’t welcoming towards queer people of color, and so having my work be a way of unlearning so many internalized grievances over parts of myself that have always been beautiful has been life-changing. To grow up in a society with Eurocentric beauty standards was and will never be easy, but finding love and compassion and communities who understand and have similar sentiments has been nothing short of beautiful. I love you, I’m glad I exist.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
My life has had plenty of ups and downs, especially in regards to my upbringing and both internalized and external racism growing up. I grew up in a very conservative household, and was often told that my desire to pursue a career in the arts was something that should stay as just a dream. I also struggled a lot with my own body dysmorphia growing up (I was always a very curvy girl), and it took me a long time to not only accept my body but also love my body. Luckily I’ve always had quite a rebellious spirit, and now I’ve managed to make quite a name for myself in the art community in Austin. Most of my work is centered around celebrating pleasure, queerness, and the feminine form because that’s the type of work that I wish I would have seen more of growing up, especially by South Asian artists.
The fact of the matter, though, is that I didn’t see a lot of work with these types of themes made by South Asian artists because our society still often prioritizes showcasing work from white artists (even if the themes that are being spoken about are often stolen or plagiarized from artists of color). We see this problem time and time again, from the world of music, literature, and every form of art that’s out there. All of us artists of color are expected to adhere to the rules of Eurocentric art spaces, and if we don’t then we are essentially pushed under the rug. The majority of art spaces in Austin still heavily face this problem as well. Most art studios here don’t prioritize giving more space to artists of color in the city, and, if they do, then they do it as a way of giving themselves a “pat on the back” for being supposedly “better than the rest”. This is something that I hope to see change over the next couple of years; we need more art spaces owned by artists of color, especially by queer artists of color. We need more community that actually feels like it was meant for us (queer people of color), especially in the climate of the world we live in at the moment.
We are currently living through a time period of increased censorship; I even had my original Instagram account taken down because their faulty AI system thought I was a bot (and yes it’s very ironic to me to be accused of being a bot by a bot). Although I was heartbroken at first to lose my account of over a decade, I also quickly came to my senses about how I really need to start prioritizing giving more people my personal contact info, especially my email. It’s weird to be someone who has seen the rise and fall of the internet and to see how much it’s changed (and to witness how the profiles of queer artists of color are being disproportionately taken down by all the social media giants). It has made me appreciate physical media a lot more, and now I’m prioritizing getting a lot of my favorite photos printed and working on building closer bonds with my friends outside of the para-social Meta universe. I have a new Instagram account now, but I am using it just as a reference for my art until the false-positives of Meta’s AI moderation is fixed for good. We never knew what to expect with the rise of AI moderation, and I can personally say that it’s for the best to steer on the side of caution. We need to take power into our own hands and stop relying on these faulty apps that don’t care about us to keep us safe and control our livelihoods; we need to build real, in-person communities and remember that we are living, breathing humans, not just numbers on an app.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
As of right now, I am primarily a figure model in Austin, and I also do various other forms of art every here and there too! I initially started figure modeling in 2024 for Highland Art Collective, and since then I now figure model about once or twice a month for a couple of different art collectives, including Contra/Common, Fantasy Figure ATX, Factory on 5th, Riches Art Gallery, and many others! It works out because figure modeling really allows me to almost enter a meditative-state while posing (it’s basically like doing long yoga poses), and I also love to see the variety of mediums and techniques that artists will use to draw me in their vision, so the art of being a muse just comes to me very naturally. Through figure modeling I have also come to embrace and love my body in a way that I never thought was possible; being a bigger-sized girl in the early 2000’s really did a number on how I perceived my body, but the amount of times that I’ve been told that my body is very “fun to draw” and how inspiring it is to be able to draw someone who looks like me has healed my inner child in more ways than anyone could imagine. Thank you to everyone who has ever booked me as a model and everyone who books me in the future – me and my inner child love you deeply.
In recent years, I have also been exploring performance art, being a muse for a wide range of art shows (such as holding a long pose while being painted on canvas or being physically body painted), and creating art of my own with a wide range of mediums. In regards to performance art, in 2022 I had performed as a type of “haunted house actor” during a horror-themed art show at Native Hostel where I was one of the few witches in the audience that would walk around and scare folks. Then, right when the performance pieces began, me and the other “witches” all gathered up and performed a pre-show ritual for the audience. I still have people mention how freaked out they were at the show to me to this day. Fast forwarding now, in early 2025 I was invited to be a part of my dear friend Greer Sike’s show at the Vortex titled “Feminists: ReMounted”, in which I performed a personal rendition of a piece originally done by Annie Sprinkle mixed with a bit of my own backstory and upbringing. This had been my first time performing solo on stage, and, although at first the experience was quite nerve-wrecking (I have really bad stage fright), after I got used to performing in front of a crowd (with the help of wearing a mask at the beginning of my act) the experience became utterly transformative. The piece was paying tribute to sacred beings of the past and so performing it live felt like a communal ritual, and many folks that were at the show came up to me afterwards to say they felt the same. It was an experience I’ll never forget, and I hope to do more performance art in the upcoming future.
As for all the times that I’ve modeled at art shows, some of the most memorable for me have been when I was body painted at both the Portal Into the Mind show in 2024 (I was painted by Oodles of Doodles and the show was put on by Beautifully Chaotic Art by Manni) and when I was most recently body painted at Bodies of Work (this time around I was painted by Axuro LTD and the show was held at Hive Mind Studios by Leah Bury and Loria Mendoza). There’s something very cathartic about being allowed to be turned into an art piece yourself while at an art show, and, as someone who already enjoys being a muse, the experience of being body painted in front of a crowd makes it all the more memorable.
I have also recently had the incredible opportunity to work with the team at Touched Magazine to be featured in their very first publication while modeling in a fashion that embraces my cultural heritage, along with having one of my favorite art pieces that I’ve made featured in the magazine (Let the Bodies Hit the Sutra). I also worked with Peachfuzz Magazine to be featured on their 2026 calendar which is an absolute dream come true, and I also modeled some beautiful custom-made chainmail with Angel Spit in 2024 (photographed by the lovely Manderbot)! Last but definitely not least, I had the incredible opportunity this year to model for my friend Allie Gallion on her “Shorna Fortuna” piece, in which she took a nude photo of my backside pointing upwards and turned the photo into a print and then plastered the print in multiple highly visible areas around the city, including the Whole Foods intersection on South Lamar. This piece in particular garnered a LOT of attention from both friends and strangers alike, and it’s super cool to be able to drive around Austin and see my body pointing in the direction of “good fortune”, plus I’ve always loved seeing work featuring bodies of all sorts of shapes and sizes, so to have a more curvy body represent something so beautiful makes me feel truly honored. Some of my favorite spots to find the piece are the South Lamar location (of course), North Lamar location by Austin Tattoo Co., and the Mopac trail location!
I’m so honored to have worked with so many incredible creatives around this city over the years, and I’m looking forward to doing even more creative collaborations and art in general in the near future.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
I had a very active imagination as a kid, and so I used to literally pretend like my favorite characters in TV shows and video games were real. When I was in the 4th grade, I had two close friends who had convinced both me and my entire class that Pokémon were real, and the most interesting part about it is that I would feel like I could literally see the Pokémon that I gradually felt more and more endearment for. We would all run around and pretend to give our Pokémon snacks, make them battle each other, and would even “recharge” our Pokémon by holding on to metal poles around the playground (even if it was blazing hot outside and the poles would semi-burn our hands). You could say we were all basically in a state of psychosis, or you could say that maybe, just maybe, what we saw was actually there. Who knows what’s real anymore in the age of AI, right?
I remember at the very end of the year, my teacher Mrs. Kirby had tried to “ban” all of us from even mentioning anything about Pokémon in class (she had also “banned” other kids in my class from speaking Spanish because she “couldn’t understand what the kids were saying”; when I got older I realized how intolerant of a person she really was), but then, during a movie night that every class had at the end of the year, everyone in my class banded together and used construction paper to create costumes of all of our favorite Pokémon and demanded that she play the first Pokémon movie for us. I guess she must have gotten intimidated enough (deservingly so, she mistreated us often) to where she backed down and played the movie we wanted while we all role-played as our favorite Pokémon the rest of the day. This was definitely my most proud and memorable childhood memory!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/shornahaque
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/silkyshroomy
- LinkedIn: https://substack.com/@shornahaque
- Twitter: https://x.com/silkyshroom
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@silkyshroom
- Other: Email: silkyshroom@gmail.com
