About the work

I hope you can recognise the face of Carol White. She was most famous for her roles in the films ‘Cathy Come Home’ and ‘Poor Cow’ and the TV version of ‘Up the Junction’ in the mid sixties but I fear she may have been as forgotten as the characters she portrayed. I was born in 1966 and the housing crisis and the social and economic injustice that these films deal with don’t seem to have improved much. In fact the films could just as easily be set in the Britain of today. Pete Meaden described the mod phenomena of the early sixties as ‘an aphorism for clean living under difficult circumstances’. In these films Carol White manages to graciously rise above the shit of daily life.

 

The more I hear about the cost of living crisis the more it sounds like a euphemism or an excuse. It is as if it’s a natural phenomena that can’t be altered rather than the deliberate and manufactured situation that it is. In contrast to the working class youth of the early sixties described by Meaden the seats of parliament and the establishment they always end up representing can be said to exhibit dirty living under easy circumstances. It makes me think that the phrase cost of loving crisis would be more appropriate. In 1987 the Style Council, well known for their socially conscious pop in a country and decade as unbalanced as today, released a single called ‘The Cost of Loving’ which is where the title of the drawing comes from, ‘Honey, that just won’t do.’  

Date and country of birth

1966, GB

Career Highlights

Retrospective exhibition, Holbourne Museum, Bath, UK (2019)

Retrospective exhibition, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, USA (2018)

Over the last twenty five years Shaw has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad most recently at The Box in Plymouth, Taiwan and Limerick City Art Gallery in Ireland.