Kate Shaw’s landscape paintings are part real, part surreal. Exploring the contradiction between our inherent connection to the natural world and continual distancing from it, her work is greatly inspired by the world around her.
Based between Melbourne and the US, Shaw travels the globe to find inspiration. “Most of the time I really need to experience a place before I make work about it,” she told Lost At E Minor. “Recently, I did a residency at SIM in Iceland that allowed me to travel to some amazing places there. The lava flows and melting glaciers create incredible sculptural forms, which inspires how I translate this into the paintings. I am very visceral.”
According to Shaw, her passion for landscape painting was also a byproduct of her travels, while visiting Central Australia. “A visit to Central Australia in 2004 really helped me coalesce ideas about the materiality of paint and how this could connect with the material world through landscape,” she explained. “The sedimentary layers of rocks literally looked like the paint I was playing around with in my studio, and it started from there.”
Exhibited in cities around the world, her paintings serve as reinterpretations of what actually constitutes landscape painting, both within an art history context and a contemporary social context.
Take a look.
