Kate Shaw’s exhibition Hell and Highwater at Sullivan+Strumpf in 2007 marked a pivotal evolution in her practice, where she embraced the unpredictable fluidity of poured paint to generate evocative, semi-abstract landscapes. Inspired by surreal landforms encountered in Central Australia, Shaw abandoned traditional brushwork for a more intuitive process, allowing acrylic and resin to flow and mingle across surfaces. The resulting forms became raw material for compositions that straddle the line between chance and intention. This method connects her work to early modernist experimentation and the unconscious processes of artists like Max Ernst, whose frottages extracted imagery from material textures. The essay by Kirsten Rann frames Shaw’s pours as acts of material autonomy, echoing Clement Greenberg’s ideals of two-dimensional purity, even as Shaw challenges those boundaries by collaging the pours into depth-defying terrains.

Shaw's technique results in paradoxical imagery—landscapes that feel at once natural and hyperreal, grounded and psychedelic. Works like Flow, Mirror Matter, and Mass depict melting mountains, volcanic streams, and suspended icebergs that hover in luminous skies sprayed with airbrushed atmosphere. Her mirrored compositions and hallucinatory palettes distort the boundary between realism and illusion, transforming paint into geological metaphor. Rann notes how the marbled swirls resemble sedimentary layers or ghost gum bark, drawing a connection between medium and subject. By exploiting the random effects of paint, Shaw uncovers a symbiotic relationship between process and image, allowing the medium itself to hint at ecological, psychological, and planetary narratives.

Ultimately, Hell and Highwater transcends traditional landscape painting by creating visionary scenes born from both accident and precision. Shaw’s method of ‘looking into’ the pours—akin to interpreting Rorschach inkblots—invites the viewer into a dialogue between perception and imagination. As Rann argues, this process reflects an “exploitation of chance” where new, hidden worlds emerge from the very nature of the paint. The exhibition encapsulates a tension between control and chaos, abstraction and figuration, pushing viewers to reconsider the material and symbolic potential of the painted surface. In doing so, Shaw contributes a bold, alchemical voice to contemporary landscape painting.