Hell and Highwater
Sullivan and Strumpf
Sydney 2007

Shaw began her painting career by refusing traditional painting. Using a spray gun rather than a brush, her early work comprised images of urban and interior architectural environments with a leaning towards the psychedelic. But after discovering some bizarre landforms while travelling through Central Australia (2005)1 she sought a new way of

working, and soon developed the technique for producing images out of what she calls ‘-

pours’ These stimulate her imagination to find the suggestive forms from which her extraordinary visions and vistas are produced. I imagine US art critic Clement Greenberg approving the formal relationships Shaw explores between abstraction and materiality in the first phase of her art production. His view that the true critical potential of painting lay in the possibility of its’ autonomy is supported by each ‘paint-pour’ as they demonstrate ‘... the only condition of painting shared with no other art’: a ‘two dimensionality’ that’s determined by the ‘properties of the pigment’ (the painting and its confinement within ‘the shape of the support’  

Catalogue Essay, Kirsten Rann, Curator and Writer 2007