Kate Shaw’s passion for landscape painting began when she traveled to 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 recalled in an interview with Lost At E Minor. “The sedimentary layers of rocks literally looked like the paint I was playing around with in my studio, and it started from there.”
It might have started there, but the best was yet to come. Now based between Melbourne and the US, Shaw’s paintings continue to be a reflection of her surroundings, inspired by her travels around the world. “Most of the time I really need to experience a place before I make work about it,” she explained, adding that she’s really “very visceral.”
But though based on her observations, her art is also very much surreal, exploring themes like alchemy and environmental change, as she continuously reinterprets what constitutes landscape painting. “Recently, I did a residency at SIM in Iceland that allowed me to travel to some amazing places there,” she says. “The lava flows and melting glaciers create incredible sculptural forms, which inspires how I translate this into the paintings. I am very visceral.”
A continuous reflection of her environment, her work also takes her to cities like New York and San Francisco, to London and Hong Kong, all of which have exhibited her paintings. Scroll down to see some of her paintings.
