Otherwise he'd be dead, 2013, gouache, collage, 6" x 6"
FRANCES SHAW
Artist Statement
I find, as I work, I am always re-discovering how little I know about what I see. I also find I have the most fun and do the best work when I don't know exactly what is going to happen.
In an un-determined state I move in the debatable and fertile territory between true and false, real and unreal. I see both people and space as switching field and ground, whether that switch is spatial or interpretive. I see the patterned and abstract as co-existing equally with the figurative, the referential. I love to have a still life equal to a bright blob, a familiar face where it shouldn't be, extending lines bringing us to an unknown place.
As humans, we literally can’t see without imposing our own meaning on the world. We experience daily life as layered, from daydreams to running for the bus. In a sense, we are always seeing double, what we think we see and something else. It is that something else I am trying to find by combining the literal and the known with the unfamiliar, symbolic and abstract.