Shaun Daniel Allen’s fourth solo exhibition, 'Between Lands', charts a journey through resonant spaces encountered over the past eighteen months. The paintings are built from traces of movement and memory. Colour acts as a navigational marker, with specific hues pulled from the environment and reappearing as echoes of place. These works document the flow of water, land, and life, compressing time to merge past, present, and future into a single visual field.
The exhibition reflects a process of returning and grounding. The artist’s distinctive lines, developed across previous bodies of work, now intersect with new backgrounds drawn from recent landscapes. This is not a rupture but a deepening, a practice where the artist becomes a conduit. Each painting functions as a portal, holding the energy of a suspended moment, from the quiet tension of an interior to the vibrant stillness of a forest clearing.
To stand before these works is to enter into their logic. The paintings impose their own residue, leaving traces on the viewer. You become part of the exchange, carrying the impression forward. 'Between Lands' orients us to the narratives embedded in place, revealing the enduring presence of Country across all terrain.
Between Lands is a meditation on place and is infused with traces and movement between places.
Traces of colour are always something that stand out the most to me in any environment. Waiting for the environments to show me all the hues it has to offer. For those colours to be embedded in my mind, and act of reminders of place when I see them elsewhere.
Traces of colour and hue that haunt the artists memory of the places he has moved through…
Traces of movement in and out of land, the traces of movement within land, of water, flora, fauna, the city and the country…
Traces of past work, memories of movement and form, the traces of a process of grounding in which the artist feels he is a vessel…
Traces of objects over time, the way that traces bend time out of linear experience, merging past, present and future…
You follow traces to orient yourself when moving within and between lands. The past is alive and present in each step. Traces form a narrative, a journey. You walk into a room and the air is thick with energy… you trace an upturned chair, a broken bottle, a tooth, a bloodstain, the air is thick with calamity and tension, time is suspended, you are overwhelmed with traces of past and present danger… you walk into a forest clearing and all is silent, you trace a groove bored into the side of a branch, a sun-bleached fallen tree, the moment of stillness erupts into life and the clearing pulsates with energy as trails of ants resume their labour, an inquisitive bird cocks its head at you, the grass beneath you wavers…
I was feeling like my work might change drastically due to all these new influences. They’ve circled back and doubled down on familiarity. I’m merging new backgrounds drawn from these landscapes with the lines I’ve been working on for the last few years.
In Between Lands we see an artist retracing his steps into moments and places that have resonated over the past 18 months since his last exhibition... We experience the bending and folding of time, retracing between lands, tracks and traces, colour and hue. We are immersed into the painting as an event which will leave its own traces on us. We become a part of a process, we become vessels ourselves. A painting is a portal, we move between lands, we are immersed in colour, stained... we stain all that we touch and are touched by, we carry traces forward.
Artworks and our understanding of events, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of where we are and how we got there… traces and impressions, colour and form…
DX