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 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 subsequently received her MFA at Columbia University, School of Arts, New York, NY (2019). Recent institutional recognition includes work selected for Under the Talking Tree, Kunsthal n, Copenhagen, DK (2025); Tender Loving Care, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA (2023); Draw, 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 exhibitions at NARANJO 141, Mexico City, MX (2024); Chapter NY (with Antonia Kuo), New York, NY (2023); In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and Rhabbitat, Los Angeles, CA (2016). Shaw's work is held in international public and private collections including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the JP Morgan Chase Collection. Shaw currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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