Orb, 2018, Kate Shaw
Lenticular print, 90cm
Provenance: New Directions, Melbourne.
Exhibited: Mirus Gallery, San Francisco 2018.
Splitting her time between working in Melbourne and the USA, Kate Shaw is an award winning landscape artist. Her work reimagines the traditional form of landscape painting and how it fits within modern society, where we simultaneously connect and disconnect from the natural world. Shaw’s methodology includes paint pouring and college, and is particularly concerned with representing environmental change in her works.
Orb was painted as part of Kate Shaw’s Shadowlands series of works. In this particular collection, Shaw is focussed on exploring the physical manifestation of darkness on the landscape, by using phosphorescent paint, lenticular lightbox prints, and video projection. Her use of paints with vivid hues and iridescent qualities prove the landscapes to have an attractive and idealistic quality. Yet, there is an artificiality that leads to a deeper, almost haunting underlying message of environmental toxicity. She seeks to represent the dichotomy of beauty and damage in the natural world (1).