Collection: Shane Drinkwater

Shane Drinkwater was born and raised in Tasmania but now lives and works in Queensland, Australia. Drinkwater dropped out of the art academy at home in Tasmania after a very short while because he felt he did not fit in. Got a scholarship in Paris for a few months, but was so happy to be there that he stayed for 6 years before moving back to Australia.

 Since Drinkwater was a child, he has been very fascinated by working with everything that involves numbers, such as collecting and classifying them. Shane often talked about how many steps there were to school, or to a store, and sometimes it was a game to guess how many steps there actually were to the destination. Numbers have always been a big part of his life.

 Shane throws himself into an art where the same motif or idea is repeated over and over again. He always uses the same pattern, so the viewer should not waste his time looking for motives or meaning - the viewer must make his own story. One could almost use a comparison to the small cells of the excel sheet, which are filled by necessity with a color, a shape or a simple motif such as number systems, letters or characters reminiscent of extinct written language. In a Danish context, some of his works may in fact be reminiscent of rune stones or primitive petroglyphs. The materials Shane uses for his works are often cardboard, pattern paper or wallpaper painted with ink and acrylic paint.

 The inspiration for the triangular works comes from Shane's childhood. Tasmania has almost a shape like a triangle, and the first time he had to sail from the island to Australia with his Mother, he said that now they could see Tasmania as a real triangle. Shane believed that they now saw the land from its bottom base and not from one of the side points on the triangle.