Shaw is a third generation Stained Glass Artist delivering restoration, conservation and design-led projects throughout Scotland alongside his own creative practice. This work inspired him to adopt a fascination with material processes and to experiment with centuries-old techniques to establish his own creative direction. Shaw’s practice centralises around material process, principally how material is in a perpetual state of change through a dualistic, iterative exchange with process.
For Hidden Door 2019, Shaw will install a stained glass rose window within the theatre. The design originates from a rose window within Orkneys St. Magnus Cathedral where Shaw’s father worked restoring the stained glass during the 90’s and early 2000’s. It is a self-reflective work that considers heritage and mortality – the lead line in conjunction with red flash glass is suggestive of a cross section of bodily, arterial tissue.
For Hidden Door 2017, Shaw Installed composition of leather works from his static performance of makers titled ‘Torso’. The piece examines our continuous, conscious and subconscious reformation with contorted, structural figures in vibrant red.
Hidden Door 2015 saw Shaw present ‘Dionysius’, one of seven in his series of abstract mechanisms; a suspended steel cube on which one thousand cast glass pieces were installed. The work was a conceptual questioning of identity and disillusionment.