Kat Shapiro Wood
Born 1980 Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Mullumbimby, Northern NSW
Kat Shapiro Wood’s practice is centred around the medium of encaustic (based on beeswax and natural resin), and spans the disciplines of painting, sculpture and ceramics, often drawing on the form and materiality of found objects and substrates.
Through the minimal framework of abstraction, her work will often draw on such parameters as the repetitive stripe or colour field, within which she may tease out the nuances of the medium and harness a luminosity that gives substance to space. In reaching towards the complexities of human experience, choices are made that may viscerally and intuitively define the elusive yet essential nature of those observations. Colour, however restrained, is a potent consideration in the process. Gesture comes into play in painterly application and form, in an attempt to distil an emotive state of being to its simplest form. There is a constant investigation into materiality, and into the sensorial potential of surface, tactility, translucency, opacity, depth, weight and light; the painting then asserts itself as something more akin to an object in its physicality.
I’m interested 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.
Shapiro Wood has held solo and group exhibitions at Chalk Horse Gallery, 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. She is a 2006 graduate of the National Art School majoring in Ceramics, where her work with encaustic became a strong part of her focus.