Kate Shaw’s Underground Sun exhibition emerged from her time spent on residency in the Top End of Australia, where the raw, untamed landscape profoundly influenced her evolving vision of nature and its unseen forces. Immersed in the unique ecology and searing light of the Northern Territory, Shaw absorbed the vibrant contrasts of tropical wetlands, monsoonal skies, and scorched rock formations. Her encounters with this land—both deeply spiritual and visually arresting—inspired a new palette of fiery ochres, sun-bleached tones, and glowing ultraviolets. In Underground Sun, these colours seem to radiate from beneath the surface, suggesting an inner heat or energetic pulse within the landscape. Shaw’s poured paint technique, with its unpredictable marbling and mirrored forms, channels the cyclical violence and beauty of this environment—both ancient and ever-changing.

During her residency at 24HrART, Shaw also engaged with the cultural and geological histories embedded in the Top End’s terrain. The exhibition’s title, Underground Sun, evokes subterranean energy and the presence of time held within rock and soil. It hints at the solar power that once nourished ancient forests now transformed into mineral-rich earth, as well as the deep Indigenous knowledge systems that understand land as a living, storied entity. These ideas are visualized through her molten, reflective compositions—where explosive colour swirls into the contours of imagined mountains, floodplains, and subterranean caverns. The works suggest a planet in flux, one where the geological and the cosmological meet, and where Shaw continues her exploration of what lies just beyond human perception.In this body of work, Shaw also reflects on humanity’s complex role within the landscape—our desire to extract, shape, and dominate natural systems, often without understanding their full consequences. The Top End’s extremes—flood and drought, fire and regeneration—become metaphors in Shaw’s work for this fragile relationship. The glistening, toxic beauty of her resinous surfaces seduce the viewer, only to provoke deeper unease about environmental degradation and climate change. In Underground Sun, Shaw is not merely documenting a region; she is conjuring the psychic imprint it leaves behind, combining the immediacy of paint with the slowness of geological time. It is a vivid meditation on place, transformation, and the deep, glowing power that lies just beneath the skin of the earth.