Kate Shaw’s Lands End exhibition is both a visual and conceptual meditation on thresholds—between land and sea, body and earth, form and dissolution. Geraldine Barlow’s accompanying poem frames this edge as an existential precipice, where the terrestrial meets the celestial in a kind of cosmic ricochet. Her imagery—a “spinning yawn of black” where oceans “cascade to spill, and mist, and ricochet against the stars”—perfectly echoes Shaw’s signature aesthetic: marbled paint pours that evoke shifting geological forms and elemental chaos. Shaw’s landscapes are not fixed; they are in constant flux, visualizing the dynamic tension that Barlow articulates as both collapse and regeneration. In this way, the works don’t merely illustrate nature—they embody its processes.

Barlow’s poem also explores the corporeal as part of the land, suggesting a symbiosis where “land and body rest always in each other.” This idea resonates deeply with Shaw’s manipulation of paint to create organic, bodily landscapes—surfaces that suggest sediment, flesh, growth, and erosion simultaneously. Her works like Panorama and Summit don't depict static scenery; instead, they pulse with life, with layers turning in on themselves, echoing the poem’s “marbled suchness” and cyclical becoming. Both poem and painting propose that land’s end is not a boundary but a merging point—a site of transformation, decay, and re-creation. Through this synergy of word and image, Lands End becomes a philosophical inquiry as much as a sensory one.