Thank you for visiting choleshaw.co.uk. It will be expanding soon, please return to see more work, future exhibitions and projects in progress.
Shows:
19th-23rd June 'Falmouth Degree Show'
28th June-4th July 'Sunrise with Sea Monsters' at Trinity Bouy Wharf, London.
www.sunrisewithseamonsters.net
My practice centres on themes of monument and relic. I am greatly interested in the quiet gravitas held by artifacts, architectural forms and archaeological sites which stand as testament to time elapsed. Specifically, it is the casings for and of monuments, relics and edifices which interest me in the duality they present as both physical and symbolic vessels.
Through exploring casings, the idea of the book as monument has transpired as a prevalent theme in my work: the book is a corporeal vessel for a more abstract, intangible content.
"The primordial book is taken to be edifying because it is an edifice. Illuminated, gilded, carved, locked shut, with its clasp, its hard back, its coppered corners, its intersecting architectonic edges - that archetype issuing from the monastic scriptoria duplicates the closure of the cloister."
(Débray, Régis 1996, "The Book As A Symbolic Object" In The Future of the Book :143)
My current work is made by a process of reduction: by simplifying and flattening the emphatically solid forms of monuments, casings and books, they become maps or blueprints of themselves. The resulting images, by virtue of the paring down and flattening of the forms and through the uniformity of scale and technique used, are often similar in appearance and seem almost interchangeable.
chloe-shaw@hotmail.co.uk
chloeshaw.co.uk