CHALK HORSE is thrilled to share Kat Shapiro Wood’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Flux.
Her most ambitious body of work to date, the sculptural paintings tease out poetic associations within materials and techniques that have been in consistent dialogue across her practice – beeswax, silk organza, gouache, plaster, copper and glass – and reveal how their fluid, serendipitous relationships to one another can deliver us to deeper philosophical and emotional experiences.
There is a parallel responsiveness of both the mediums of encaustic and clay to a state of flux. It is a necessity of their transformation. A clay body depends on a flux as an active ingredient and an accelerator of heatwork in order to form an internal crystalline structure in the process of becoming vitrified ceramic. It enhances melt and fluidity. Clay has a persistent memory that expresses the fluid character of flux as a vehicle of change. Encaustic is necessarily melted and applied so, and continually withstands varying degrees of fluxing in the repeated fusing process throughout the accumulation of layers and the manipulative heatwork.
Throughout the gestation and development of this body of work there was a poetic mirroring around the nature of this ‘flux’ element that became evident in my own state of being and wellbeing, and a similar unavoidable fluidity required to create the work in the face of challenge and obstacle. At times a more intensive encounter asserted itself, which would amplify the demands of physicality, and others a state of flow and grace. There was a persistent impulse to employ the inate balm-like qualities of beeswax, along with its chosen colouring, in response to my own needs and also in an act of prayer for all of the relentless brutalities unfolding externally in my awareness.
Three ambitiously scaled encaustic works stretch the limits of the medium and what I can physically handle, along with two slightly smaller ones. Stretched silk organza is stained with gouache, providing an underpainting that interacts with the overlaid encaustic and also leaves a coloured edge bordering the face of the work. The first layers penetrating the silk ground are pigment and oil-tinted encaustic that are repeatedly heat-fused and scraped back with a razor. Textured areas that appear across the silk from the heatwork, along with tears (a consequence of the vigorous scraping action) provide tooth to trap scumbled oil paint. A further encaustic layer might then be imposed, and again scraped back to the point that the final surface allows the residual layers and embedded markings to breathe through and quietly punctuate the depth of atmosphere.
As always, I’m moved by the poetic connections and relationships that reveal themselves along the way and act as generative stepping stones between works in the process of making. There is an abiding impulse to stimulate a resonance within a work, or between dual colours of stripes or each panel of a diptych, and also across the works in the show. The diverse materials and mediums function as pollinators and informants in my palette of possibility. Ultimately, the works embody the varying states of being that are drawn upon and arrived at in the making process. They intend to offer a place of respite, elevation and salve in my own and- more broadly- our current existential confrontations. My way in to that territory is bodily, tender and emotive; the nuanced sensuality of material, colour, form and surface provide a possible threshold to a more subtle and numinous universality of experience.
