Walt Shaw / About
Walt Shaw is a visual artist, musician and performance artist from the Derby area. His visual art is abstract, painting and mixed-media assemblages with found objects and collage and installation.
He was a founder artist in the BET4 group and has exhibited widely in this country and in continental Europe. Walt is a percussionist, currently with Borderline Guerillas, Corey Mwamba / Shaw duo, Corey’s Symbiosis Ensemble, Birmingham Improviser’s Orchestra and Mahood, the Shaw / Graham Foster duo. His approach to percussion has always been experimental, involving free improvisation, home-made instruments, found objects and electronics.
The cross-disciplinary work began about fifteen years ago, partly driven by a need to fuse these otherwise disparate elements. It was with BET4performance that Walt worked with dancers, musicians and performance artists in the UK, Germany and France. He is at the moment with BET4motion.
Walt had a previous career as a biology teacher and about five years ago he started to produce cross-disciplinary, collaborative work to explore scientific ideas in a very experimental, abstract and fluid way. A number of projects were initiated under a general title of ‘Live Art Laboratory’, including Genanarchy / Gamelanarchy, Polarities, Mendel’s Garden, Timepoints
and currently Entropic.
Each of these projects involved a series of performances collaborating with artists from different disciplines. There are images of these pieces on the website.This work led to the production of an academic paper on the Live Art Laboratory along with Simon Piasecki from University College Chester, both there and at Glamorgan University.
This year, 2006, Walt is carrying on producing visual art, but also a number of other projects. He is to exhibit two sound installations in Germany with Graham Foster, working on a project, “Surface” with contemporary dancer Joanna Geldard and continuing work with BET4motion on 3 main projects, ‘Synaesthesia’, ‘BETango’ and ‘Betterlife.’
Entropic (Performance)
Entropic deals with our need to create mental constructs of systems and order, to try and make sense of an increasingly fragmented and chaotic world. In the project, Walt photographed 64 random sites over an area of 120 square kilometres of south Derbyshire. Material was collected from each site, bagged, labelled, collated and placed in a box designated for each site. Prior to the performance, the 64 boxes are stacked into a 12 square metre cube, in which performers and objects are compacted.
As the performance unfolds, there is a slow explosion of this tight, systemised cube. With some help from the audience, the order and classification is eroded. There follows a manic drive to reproduce the order, propelled by an urgency to create meaning and a framework of logic once more. Whether this is achieved is left open to question.
The performance closely integrates dance, sound, music and physicality with a powerful visual aesthetic.