Kate Shaw’s Irrational Geographic, exhibited at Sullivan + Strumpf in 2008, was conceived during her residency at Flux Factory in New York. While in the United States, Shaw travelled extensively through the national parks of the country’s southwest, immersing herself in the vast desert landscapes, geological formations, and intense shifts of light and colour. These encounters with iconic terrains such as Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, and Arches National Park became a catalyst for her exploration of how the sublime and surreal intersect within the language of landscape painting.

The resulting works fused poured-paint abstraction with imagined topographies, creating dreamlike scenes that blurred the lines between representation and invention. Shaw’s process embraced both chance and control: paint was poured, left to flow and pool unpredictably, and then coaxed into suggestive landforms. This method mirrored the layered histories of the landscapes that inspired her—geological time, Indigenous histories, and personal memory converging within a single frame. The saturated palettes and iridescent surfaces conveyed both the grandeur and fragility of the environments she encountered.

By merging the urban intensity of her New York residency with the awe-inspiring natural forms of the American Southwest, Irrational Geographic presented a vision of landscape that was at once rooted in place and liberated from it. Shaw’s paintings evoked the physicality of real terrain while simultaneously existing in a realm of heightened imagination. In this way, the exhibition offered viewers a journey through spaces that felt both familiar and otherworldly, inviting contemplation on the ways in which place, perception, and creative interpretation continually reshape each other.

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