Ashley Crawford’s essay elucidates, "Shaw’s poured and collaged landscapes are not depictions of specific places but manifestations of an imaginative and chemical process, reminiscent of Rorschach tests or surrealist decalcomania. In Shaw’s hands, paint behaves like a living substance—glaciers erupt, mountains melt, and organic forms rise from abstract flows. The result is a curious duality: we might recognize familiar geographic forms, but we are simultaneously confronting the abstract mechanics of fluid paint in motion" Crawford likens Shaw’s vision to a post-apocalyptic terrain or even a re-imagined pre-human world, suggesting that these works access a kind of cellular or ancestral memory.

Rather than subscribe to a literal or biographical reading of Shaw’s experiences in Australia’s desert interior, Crawford insists that the landscapes are imagined—not reflective of direct observation but of cultural memory and unconscious recognition. This is where Shaw’s work intersects with the theoretical realm of semiotics, particularly Roland Barthes’ ideas of signs becoming stand-ins for the real. A mountain in Shaw’s work may resemble a known peak, but its visual construction is pure illusion—a branded sign, an echo of landscape painting’s historic use as advertising, particularly in the colonial context. Through meticulous layering, marbling, and montage, Shaw destabilizes the viewer’s relationship to the natural world, suggesting that our interpretation of landscape is more deeply tied to cultural pattern recognition than to physical experience.

Ultimately, Shaw functions less as a landscape painter and more as an alchemist, manipulating material to straddle the terrain between destruction and creation, abstraction and representation. Her mountainous vistas, frozen lakes, and erupting terrains suggest both a mythical origin story and a speculative future. As Crawford points out, this is landscape at the brink of metamorphosis—snowdrifts morph into tree roots, geological upheavals are rendered in psychedelic marbling, and familiar forms dissolve into primordial flux. Shaw’s works resist categorization, functioning as both memory and invention, surface and depth. They invite the viewer to decode, to identify, and to immerse themselves in a visual terrain where abstraction becomes recognition, and paint itself becomes a form of elemental memory.