Gaia Shaw

I discovered a connection with the weather and the life of the garden while playing outside as a child. The idea of nature as a bountiful mother was tempered by the fact that, to be amongst it, I would require a second hand coat, put up with drizzle, and find my own solution to being alone with the birds all morning. Still, I am grateful for my family’s embrace and pointers towards nature, for today I continue to thrive out amongst it and have never ceased to be fascinated by the weather as a truly wonderful force of nature.

My work on using the sky uses intaglio and early photographic techniques to create a print that undergoes processes from two or three distinct traditions. In the case of Light Dust, I made a contact print and built on the photographic marks with intaglio. The light-sensitive process of the photograph underlies a pigmented world of print. Metal leaf adds lustre to the surface.

Printing with the photographic process in the garden in order to explore memory and my personal history, gives me a feeling of ‘growing my own’. Subjective, drawn lines express my personal reality whilst the superimposed photographic image can convey imagination, memory and the ineffable.

Recently my work is detached from image. In Blueprint of the Sky II, I explore light and weather in a painterly way, allowing the elements of the weather to work as my tools on the cloth. The work is about the intensity of the present. The works are small adventures, in favourite and well-remembered localities. I obtain marks which I cannot predict by exposing my media to the elements. 

These portraits in a particular time and place are of, and by, the elements, with my direction. I feel intimately involved in the resultant marks which become lucid through gazing at them. My encounter with physical forces can quieten my mind’s internal dialogue. I wonder if there will emerge from this a therapeutic effect, whereby balance and reconciliation can be achieved with forces beyond the humane?