Through a diverse set of labor-intensive techniques, Pauline Shaw (b.1988) laces together shared histories, personal experiences, and belief systems into large-scale textiles and installations that speak to experience and perception. Shaw’s felted landscapes draw from the the structured processes of lace-making, wet-felting, and needle-felting to evoke the uncertainty of memory and the mysteries of our belief systems: Western-drawn borders, MRI scans, and ancestral weave patterns are overlaid with loose threaded gestures that evoke the unseen, the unconscious, the automatic. Each of the processes and materials that Shaw employs is embedded with complex legacies and tenuous relationships. Through the processes of collage and abstraction, she splices and renders each as recordings of forms that are lost, obscured, and only partially remembered. The final suspended felted panes contend with each of these questions, tracing the path of degeneration, and the fallibility of our modes of preservation, across our cultures, our lineages, and our identities at-large.

Shaw received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2011), and later received her MFA at Columbia University, School of Arts, New York, NY (2019). Her most recent institutional recognition includes work selected for Tender Loving Care at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2023); work selected for Draw at the Frost Museum, Miami, FL (2023); and a mural commissioned by the Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2023). She has been the subject of recent solo/duo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York, NY (2023); In Lieu, Art Basel Hong Kong, HK (2023); and forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2024 with Naranjo 141, Mexico City, MX and In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been selected for gallery exhibitions, most recently at Simone Subal, New York, NY (2024); Harper's Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Newchild Gallery, Antwerp, BE (2023); Dinner Gallery, New York, NY (2023); and forthcoming in 2024 at Grimm Gallery, New York, NY. Shaw currently lives and works in New York. 

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