b. 1980 in Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Mullumbimby, Northern NSW
Kat Shapiro Wood is a Northern Rivers based artist whose deeply material practice spans multiple disciplines and media, principally encaustic ‘painting’, sculpture and ceramics. While investing in their development as discreet disciplines, she also engages with the generative relationships between them, how they inform and pollinate each other, and their many hybrid possibilities. In exploring the extent to which materials can express their own inherent qualities, Wood’s work is pared back to what is most essential, sitting most comfortably within the domain of abstraction. Whether two or three dimensionally, she aims to activate a warmth and charge in the reductive process, bringing a poetic sensibility and an acute sensory attention to the subtleties of form, colour and surface, and in so doing invokes an intimacy in the bodily relationship with material. A tender minimalism, found intuitively, provides the framework to distil an emotive state of being, phenomenological enquiry, or spatial experience to its simplest form. Wood’s visceral translation of this slow and quiet searching in an elusive, liminal realm infuses the work with a sensuousness and poetic resonance.
Encaustic (an ancient painting process based on the use of a heat-worked pigmented beeswax medium) is exploited for its ability to express expansive, luminous and nuanced fields of colour, while asserting a heightened physicality in its tangible and visual depth, weight and surface quality. An intense ‘objectness’ in her approach to painting softens the boundaries between the two and three dimensional. Her interest lies in pushing the level of refinement and subtlety while exploring the medium’s inevitable rawness and sensory aliveness; the potential of stillness and quietness to contain a rich and evocative dynamism is endlessly exciting. Forever compelled to find connections, relationships, and for the ways that the techniques or materials of one discipline can inform another, the often-resultant hybrid form draws on her cultivation of traditional skills, and her capacity to find a new and refined language in their application. Vital to her sculptural objects is the nuance and intrinsic impulse in form; the attention given to these internal gestures for what they may elicit in us is a driving compulsion.
Shapiro Wood has held solo and group exhibitions at CHALK HORSE, in the Byron School of Art Project Space in Mullumbimby, the Tweed Regional Gallery, ArtState Lismore, Flinders Lane Gallery, and as an invited artist to the International Association of Ceramics 47th Congress in Barcelona in 2016. She lived and worked in Amsterdam and Berlin in 2016-17. She teaches sculpture, ceramics and drawing at the Byron School of Art, and has taught sculpture in studio schools over the last 15 years. Recently she has been a finalist in the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize as well as the the inaugural Wollumbin Art Award at Tweed Regional Gallery. In 2025 Shapiro Woof held a solo exhibition at Tweed Regional Gallery titled Precipice: The Edge of Things and has an upcoming solo exhibition at CHALK HORSE.
