Shane Cox is a visual artist working with sculpture and craft-based processes to explore contemporary relationships with land and material. His practice focuses primarily on wood as a material both natural and engineered as well as native and non-native to the island.
His art-making process consists of physical acts performed on a singular material such as shaving a wooden plank with a draw knife or bending a branch by hand. These human interactions with the material are documented in both sound and video. Through this experimentation, a point of tension emerges between the request made by these acts and the material's potential. A branch breaks or a knot in the wood refuses to be shaved down. This stretching of the material's potential and its response forms a collaboration point from which an artwork emerges.
A Woven Vernacular is a sculptural installation which explores the ordering of landscapes, and the parallel ordering of human life within them.
Comprising of two pieces; a floor-based work of non-native white pine boards, each carved on the top edge following knots in the wood. And an array of chains stretching from floor to ceiling with willow woven through, buckling the chain, and disrupting the pattern.
Accompanying these is an archival image showing a woman from the Aran islands carrying a woven basket fixed with burden ropes and screen prints of willow leaves.
Informed by the history of deforestation in Ireland the instillation speaks to a relationship found between land, exploitation, and craft. drawing attention to our relationship with material and tension in our contemporary production brought about through a culture of domination and ordering of Irish land for extraction.
The work allows a reflection on our contemporary relationship with local materials and landscapes, inviting questions of possible alternatives.