2020.4 Jan Shaw

Title
Compassion

Location
Cowra Sculpture Park 

Year
2004

Media
Sculpture

Medium
carved sandstone

Dimensions
106 x 40 x 40cm

Credit
Gift of Macquarie University 2020

Accession number
2020.4

Jan Shaw is a well-recognised Australian sculptor of sandstone – her father and grandfather owned sandstone quarries in Sydney’s north-western suburb of Epping. Her formative training was under the highly-regarded sculptor and teacher Mitzi McColl. Shaw considers her work as a process of revelation, or a metamorphosis. She creates through emotion and instinct, permitting the sandstone piece, and her understanding of its variables, to take the lead in navigating her aesthetic. From the onset, preconceived ideas of final form are banished. Shaw’s abstractionist works activate free-flowing organic forms that arise from nature and wash over the observer’s sense of perception in curvilinear embrace. Certainly, her work references, echoes and pays homage to the great international, modernist organic sculptors of the twentieth century: Henry Moore, Helaine Blumenfeld and Barbara Hepworth. The biomorphic rhythmic qualities of Shaw’s pieces, as evidenced in Whisper Again and  Compassion, suggest life forms, growth and regeneration – the original sandstone blocks having been but chrysalises.