Lucid Dreaming, Art 15 London, 2015

Kate Shaw’s exhibition Lucid Dreaming, presented at Art15 London, unfolds like a series of psychedelic portals, where geological forms and virtual surfaces intermingle. Central to the exhibition are her lenticular prints, such as Lucid and Liminal, which flicker between visual states depending on the viewer’s position. These shimmering, circular works heighten the dreamlike instability at the core of Shaw’s landscapes—places that feel both ancient and futuristic. As the term "lucid dreaming" suggests, the viewer is both immersed in a surreal experience and aware of its synthetic construction, echoing the tension in Shaw’s practice between the natural and the artificially sublime.

The exhibition’s conceptual framework, as explored in Jacquelyn O’Callaghan’s essay, frames Shaw’s practice within the legacy of the sublime—from Romanticism’s awe of nature to the uncanny valley of contemporary simulacra. Shaw’s luminous dreamscapes use glossy resin, glitter, and acid-bright pigment to seduce, but also to disturb. The lenticular medium, with its shifting imagery, amplifies this unsettling duality, embodying a world where perception is unstable and beauty masks toxicity. In this light, the “sublime” in Shaw’s work becomes a mythic remnant—no longer vast nature threatening human insignificance, but a synthetic mirage of ecological memory, slick with glamour yet steeped in decay.

Shaw’s laser-cut wall works also play a crucial role in extending the exhibition’s themes of fragmentation and illusion. These pieces, with their intricate, interlocking forms, reveal a deliberate manipulation of image and surface. As the essay notes, Shaw’s use of fragmentation reflects a postmodern willingness to embrace partiality over utopian wholeness—collage aesthetics glossed into seamless illusion. Her vivid palettes and layered structures are loaded with feminist and cultural critique, rejecting the chromophobia of Western formalism. In Lucid Dreaming, Shaw maps a topography of the psyche in flux—seductive, fractured, and entirely contemporary, where identity and landscape dissolve into one radiant, shifting hallucination.