Pauline Shaw
KEEPERS
© Nicole McLaughlin, photo by Gary Lawrence.
In 2015, Pauline Shaw learned she could make her own felt. This was a novel idea for the conceptual artist and an unexpected craft for someone with two art degrees in sculpture. Intrigued, she dove into online felting communi- ties, often learning from women who had set up studios in the former bed- rooms of their grown children. Shaw noticed that the touching, rubbing, and washing of raw wool was analogous to the feelings of nurture she experienced from her tutors. That tenderness could aid her quest to reconcile the discrepancy between considerable generational memories: her upbringing was spent between four countries, and for much of her life she believed her family to be Buddhist, discovering later they were Taoists. Was there any truth to her memories?
To seek some sort of “proof,” Shaw underwent MRI scans, “literally a picture that you get of the memory while you’re thinking of it.”1 This data became visual confirmations whose patterns, topographies, and networks she abstracted through felting. Shaw’s pieces range from the size of posters to massive, suspended installations. They are the investment of time into tactile form and read as maps that shift from micro to macro, from brain waves to the cosmos. Some are combined with hand-blown glass orbs filled with tiny sculpture scapes of sugar and silver, reminiscent of domestic family altars. Of her tapestries, Shaw wants them to “occupy the same force that I think memory plays in our lives,”2 however accurate it may be.
B. 1988, Kirkland, WA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
WW95
Pauline Shaw, Limpet Sonder Textile, 2024, Dyed and natural wool, steel rod and hardware. Courtesy of the artist, photo by R & Company.
HL2815
Pauline Shaw, Flip flop Hanging Light, 2022, Blown glass, carved basswood, paint, silver, stone,paper, hardware. Courtesy of the artist.