Kate Shaw’s 2008 exhibition Visitant at 24hr Art in Darwin emerged directly from her immersive residency in the Northern Territory, marking a pivotal moment in her engagement with remote Australian landscapes. The residency offered Shaw a rare opportunity to witness the vast, primordial beauty of the Top End—its monsoonal skies, ochre escarpments, and luminous wetlands—firsthand. This visceral experience profoundly shaped the works in Visitant, which reflect a deepened connection to the raw, ancient land and its elemental energies. The title itself, meaning a transient presence or visitor, alludes to Shaw’s respectful position as an outsider encountering a place with long, layered histories.

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The paintings in Visitant are hallucinatory and intense, constructed through her signature technique of poured acrylics and collaged imagery. In these works, the Darwin landscape is not reproduced but reimagined, abstracted into dreamlike forms that hover between geology and illusion. The Top End’s volatile weather systems and timeworn terrain are distilled into molten rivers of colour and mirrored formations, suggesting both ecological wonder and instability. Shaw captures the dual sensations of awe and fragility, drawing from the landscape’s physicality but pushing it into the psychological and metaphysical. Her approach reveals a fascination not only with the external environment but with its emotional and symbolic resonances.

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The Visitant series stands as a meditation on temporality—of the land, of climate, and of the artist herself within it. Shaw’s time in Darwin allowed her to observe how nature asserts its rhythms and patterns beyond human scale, which she translated into layered, meditative compositions. The exhibition also hints at the broader themes of displacement and impermanence, speaking subtly to colonial histories and the shifting climate that threatens these ancient ecologies. In Visitant, Shaw transcends traditional landscape painting, presenting the Top End not as a static view but as a living, changing entity—one that watches as much as it is watched.