I had the good fortune to be able to catch the last day of Kate Shaw’s, Irrational Geographic, exhibit at Sullivan+Strumpf, in Sydney last week.  It was the kind of work that made you fall in love with the entire group of paintings, not just a single piece.  I think that all of the paintings were inspired by Australian landscape, but they reminded me of glaciers in Iceland.  Between that, being a sucker for collages, and the bright colors, it’s no wonder that I wanted to get ride of everything in my apartment and buy them all! Christmas present?  :)

These images don’t really do the paintings justice, because it’s hard to see the depth created by the different textures, but great nonetheless!

“Within pours of paint, inks and mediums (and glitter and phosphorescent paint) I emulate a pseudo scientific study of the behaviour of things”

all = acrylic and resin on board

Kate Shaw’s Artist Statement:

My practice re-interprets notions of what constitutes landscape painting, both within an art historical context and a contemporary social context. The paintings deal with the tensions and dichotomies in both the depiction of the natural world and our relationship to it. I am concurrently exploring the sublime in nature whilst imbuing a sense of toxicity and artificiality in this depiction. The intention is to reflect upon the contradiction between our inherent connection to the natural world and continual distancing from it.

Within pours of paint, inks and mediums (and glitter and phosphorescent paint) I emulate a pseudo scientific study of the behaviour of things. In this I am making a connection between how on a molecular level the paints and mediums I use behave in a way that mimics something in nature. When choosing areas to cut and collage, I am looking for something that resembles sedimentary layers of rock, an ice flow, lava or bark of a tree. At the same time the collages of paint, and unexpected materials such as glitter under a surface of resin is asking the viewer to consider their usual expectations of what constitutes a painting. In this regard my work addresses the tension between abstraction and representation.

For the last few years I have visited remote areas of Australia including Arnhem Land, The Kimberly and Kakadu. This imagery has fed the basis of my work and the trips are part of a desire to experience wilderness. Whilst genuinely involved in the romanticism and awe of being in these incredible places, I am also reminded of how I am essentially a tourist in a kind of nature ‘theme-park’. Recently I travelled through the Southwest of the United States, through Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Like travelling through Australia, as well as having my own subjective connection to the experience of a place I am thinking of how others have traversed and interacted with the land.

The small-scale video work I have created aims to be an updated Claude Glass, combining video of disasters from YouTube and footage of the poured paint I use in the collage paintings. It addresses how technology influences our perception of nature. In 18th century landscape painting a small black convex mirror known as a Claude Glass was used to frame and condense a landscape, and create a tinted reflection reminiscent of a Claude Lorain painting. Recent natural disasters of the 21st Century such as the Boxing Day Tsunami, 2009 Bushfires and volcanic eruptions in Iceland, are disseminated through grainy video shot on cell phones and posted on You Tube as small-scale video. I am interested in the way that these devices effect the consumption of spectacular natural events.

 

See more awesome work here.