They say that writing about art is like dancing about architecture. But with Sarah Shaw’s entrancing work, I’m compelled to write, not about it, but within it.

It started with a few sentences put under work-in-progress shots that Shaw was uploading daily to Facebook, part of the Artist Support Pledge project for which she was making her Isolation Paintings. I couldn’t not; I simply couldn’t not write. I wrote a few sentences, then more, before paragraphs started to come. I was being lured by her imagery into conjuring phrases that echoed what I was looking at. As the weeks passed, each phrase began to form under the influence of each image, so intoxicated had they become by what I was seeing. By project’s end, I was hearing my word’s voice forming within the soaring paint updrafts and incantatory atmospheres that permeate Shaw’s beguiling work.

Atmospheres like spells: infusing Shaw’s pictures, vestiges of art history offer mental ballast against the volatile sensuality of the oil paint: echoes of Bacon’s encaged primal violence; the brooding communions of El Greco and Goya. Figures going elemental, diffusing into spirit and land – people secreted in vaginal, copse-like painted swathes. But the vestiges dissipate the more each picture gets perceived; as the magic rises and the mystery takes hold, art history getting vanished by each brooding uprush of oil, each palette-knifed carve of it. As all the symbols of culture get submerged, only the deeper stuff of memory remains.

In the Instagram diary Shaw wrote during the project, the term emerge is used repeatedly in relation to her figures: and in direct relation to memory: “I studied fine art at Falmouth and seeing tall ships out at sea was a beautiful part of my experience there so it’s no wonder they emerge in my paintings.” Emerging as a form of memory, as adhesive fusing the oils and translucent varnishes and emotional feelings that Shaw brushes and knifes into pictures. But what mystifies and intrigues here – at the very heart of Shaw’s work – is, in which direction does memory travel amongst all these gales and updrafts of oil, all these bewildered, disfiguring, hunted and haunted, merging-into-life figures? Is Isolation Paintings their coming together or falling apart? Is memory remembering here, or forgetting?

Throughout the diary, Shaw writes with a simple and deep social concern, stating “how vulnerable we are and how magnificent we are when we come together.” During these turbulent social times under Covid, when words like vulnerable and together are being redefined by those who would have them fit their own order: in her diary Shaw also writes excavate to describe how she makes use of her palette-knife; how she carves it through the oils and her emotions to shape images, metallically, the edge of a blade against wood. Excavating memory; excavating what she feels and sees in the great turmoil of our times and the great turmoil of the oils and the great people emerging through her work. Pictures of ourselves, remembering and forgetting what it is to be human.

Chris Mark Jones

‘The Artists Support Pledge was a lifeline – not just to keep the wolf from the door, but more as a focus away from the fear I was feeling on a daily basis. It was always really interesting to see what naturally evolved and emerged from such a speedy process; throwing rags at a painted canvas, working into them to reveal what I perceived there. Sometimes it was quite moving, as responses received from buyers often suggested that the imagery they discovered within was somehow mirroring their own experiences. I honestly don’t know where these things come from sometimes. I often feel like I’m being haunted when I show up to the canvas.

The interesting thing about the paintings that emerged was the meshing of times that appeared visually, and how buyers responded individually. It felt almost like I was mirroring some kind of weird response to the times we were living in, capturing a period of time which had a diary like effect – documenting, to some extent, the emotional, physical and psychical effects of living in a political and bodily pandemic” 

Sarah Shaw