If 2020 taught us anything it’s the fragility of our planet. Experts agree that the immediate crisis we are facing today has much to teach us about an even more existential threat—climate change. A first step in the right direction is accountability: understanding our role in the crisis and working towards a more sustainable future.
Australian artist Kate Shaw is here to spread awareness about what it is exactly that we stand to lose if we don’t take action. Her vivid landscape art, while highlighting the transcendent beauty of nature, points out the dangers of overpopulation and pollution in a world that is slowly dying.
“The paintings deal with the tensions and dichotomies in the depiction of the natural world and our relationship to it,” Shaw told The Art and the Curious. “I am concurrently exploring the sublime in nature whilst imbuing a sense of toxicity and artificiality in this depiction.”
Her work, made of paint pours and collage techniques might remind of natural processes. Using swirls of acrylic paint, ink, glitters and powders, she creates dramatic landscapes that are both familiar and unfamiliar. A world that is void of human presence, drawing attention to the sheer beauty of nature.
Shaw explains that she began landscape painting after 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 told 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.”
