The world folding in upon itself by Shanti Shea An at ANCA Gallery 19 April–7 May 2023

Shanti Shea An is an artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her practice is engaged with an investigation of images—including how images are constructed, how they are read, and the ways in which they ‘speak’ and withhold speech from us. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the ANU School of Art & Design.

In this solo exhibition of recent work, Shea An approaches questions of folding and mirroring within painting. A fold can be understood as a crease or pleat, a doubling or an overlapping; it involves enclosing something, reducing its surface area but increasing its complexity and thickness.

“Which is the reality and which the projection? It is often not possible to say, for emulation is a sort of natural twinship existing in things; it arises from a fold in being, the two sides of which stand immediately opposite to one another.” (Michel Foucault, “The Four Similitudes” in The Order of Things, 1966)

Artists such as Dorothea Rockburne, Tauba Auerbach and Simon Hantaï have employed practices of folding within their work. This often leads to unexpected forms and compositions, whilst also making visible a certain tension that persists between our understanding of surface and space within painting. Looking to the art of the seventeenth century, folds also appear in various guises, from the drama and theatricality of folded drapery in baroque art to the depiction of folded paper in illusionistic letter-rack paintings.

For Shea An, the gesture of folding is explored through the formal qualities of mirroring and doubling. In some works, a sheet of paper is folded to reveal both sides simultaneously. In others, the fold brings two figures closer together—perhaps into conflict—suggesting an impending break or rupture. Throughout these paintings, the fold becomes a way of reconfiguring an image and meditating upon the processes of painting and looking.

Shanti Shea An, Displaced pasture, 2022, oil on linen, 66 x 48 cm.