Kate Shaw’s Liquefaction exhibition at Nellie Castan Gallery, as described by Melissa Bianca Amore, explores the fragmentation and destabilization of the natural world through both visual and conceptual strategies. Shaw’s technique—layered pours of acrylic, resin, and ink—mimics geological phenomena such as lava flows and landslides, creating compositions that feel simultaneously organic and alien. Her works exist in a suspended state between representation and abstraction, creating what she describes as an “intermediary space” where viewers encounter an uncanny hybrid of the familiar and the imagined. Amore emphasizes that Shaw is not only painting landscapes, but interrogating the very act of perceiving them, invoking the seductive power of the hallucinatory while maintaining a deep connection to the materials and processes of nature itself.

Amore’s essay situates Liquefaction within the broader context of perceptual disruption brought about by contemporary image culture and environmental trauma. Shaw’s engagement with disaster—through video works referencing tsunamis, floods, and fires—evokes a landscape no longer passively observed but ruptured and mediated. The use of lo-fi, YouTube-sourced footage suggests a public increasingly alienated from the natural through digital saturation, yet paradoxically more exposed to its devastation. Shaw’s concept of an “updated Claude Glass”—a historical tool used to frame picturesque views—reframes our voyeurism of catastrophe, suggesting that technology has become our new lens on nature, filtered and fragmented. Amore’s writing highlights this duality, portraying Shaw’s work as both a lament and a critique of how we experience the environment in the digital age.

Ultimately, Liquefaction becomes, through Amore’s reading, a meditation on the instability of both the earth and our modes of seeing. Shaw’s role as a self-described tourist in “nature’s theme park” underscores the performative and sometimes artificial relationship contemporary society has with the natural world. Her travels across Australia and the American Southwest inform a body of work that is site-aware yet purposefully estranged from the real, invoking post-apocalyptic visions rather than idyllic terrains. Amore’s analysis reinforces Shaw’s suggestion that landscape painting today must wrestle with ecological grief, technological mediation, and the psychic aftermath of natural disaster—all of which converge in Liquefaction to produce a deeply unsettled, hauntingly beautiful vision of nature on the edge.