Jamie Shaw I was born in London, in 1986, and grew up in several cities across the south of UK, in my adult life I have moved from Brighton to London and am currently living in the North East of England. During college I studied various subjects (including art) without committing to anything, and learned mostly that I was not suited to an academic art education at that point in my life. I spent the following 5 years teaching myself to paint, and immersing myself in the local art scene in Brighton, I took on an empty space and ran small exhibitions for other artists, and worked at an established non-profit art gallery helping with large scale installations among other things. After a few years showing work in group and solo exhibitions, fairs and charity auctions I moved to London and began to develop an interest in moving image work, specifically within live visuals accompanying music at gigs and festivals. This quickly developed in a career in motion design which continues to evolve alongside my studio practice as an abstract painter. Notes on 'SUSY' body of work: I began exploring ways in which digital and physical processes could be intersected a few years ago, and one of the first approaches I took was to take images of paintings and chop them up digitally, repeating them and aligning the pieces in different ways. It seemed important to only employ techniques that would alter the original visual information and not create new information from scratch, to reconfigure the image but not to draw on top of it. I soon discovered that starting with an initial mirroring process created very interesting results. Pareidolia, the visual processing phenomenon of recognising meaningful patterns and forms in visual stimulus, has often been experienced when looking at my work, this mirroring process accelerated that to the foreground. Both realistic and fantastical organic forms present themselves at the boundaries of reflection, often the faces of creatures, but also organs, tree-like structures, bugs and other miscellaneous flora and fauna. These then float in the surrounding colour fields, changing the compositional tensions from the original painting and highlighting the subconscious tendencies I have in developing structure within a painting, whereby the more dense and detailed elements are often placed away from the centre as if emerging from beyond the boundaries of the canvas. The title for the body of work, SUSY, is borrowed from particle physics. It's an acronym for Super Symmetry; a theory which proposes that for each fundamental particle there is a twin particle with different but connected properties. It aims to deal with the problem of how particles get their mass. Whether or not it turns out to be true, I felt it synonymous with the process of making my paintings symmetrical resulting in new forms, as though they have unfurled to reveal a hidden extra dimension, creating a new perspective on the familiar.