Kate Shaw’s exhibition Nightingale, shown at Sullivan+Strumpf in 2013, takes its title from the codename for a series of nuclear tests conducted across the globe—acts of destruction cloaked in the deceptive gentleness of a songbird’s name. This jarring juxtaposition lies at the heart of Shaw’s work, where beauty and catastrophe are intrinsically entangled. Her dreamlike, molten landscapes—created through a process of pouring acrylic, resin, and glitter—dazzle the eye with psychedelic intensity, yet beneath their glossy surface lies an unmistakable sense of environmental unease. In Nightingale, the seductive allure of the sublime is reframed as a warning: what appears radiant may be radioactive.

The exhibition’s reference to nuclear testing sites evokes the literal and symbolic “flash point” of human impact on the planet—a violent, irreversible intrusion on nature that reverberates through generations. Nuclear tests such as those named Nightingale, often conducted in remote or colonized lands, left scars on both land and people, their explosions sending shockwaves through geopolitical, ecological, and ethical landscapes. Shaw’s landscapes mirror this legacy: unplaceable and uninhabitable, they present a post-detonation world where time seems suspended, and nature appears simultaneously prehistoric and post-apocalyptic. The shimmering bodies of water, the marbled peaks, and glowing skies are less Edenic retreats and more haunted ruins of a world irrevocably altered.

By naming the exhibition Nightingale, Shaw underscores the dissonance between poetic language and violent history—a strategy mirrored in her visual language. The work is not simply an aesthetic reflection of geological forms, but a psychological map of contemporary anxieties: climate crisis, contamination, and the veneer of progress. Her use of unnatural colors and synthetic materials highlights the tension between the organic and the artificial, suggesting a future shaped not by evolution, but by detonation and fallout. In this context, Nightingale becomes an elegy for a world where beauty is inseparable from harm, and where the flash of a bomb is indistinguishable from the shimmer of a resin-coated sky.