Artist Sloat Shaw in her home studio in Brookline. Photo by Milena Fernsler
Sloat Shaw isn’t sure how she first noticed the zoomorphic shape in the slab of green granite. She had been renovating her kitchen and was on the fence about the stone for her countertop. As she recounts it, she looked down at the grain pattern one day and saw a sea turtle there. It was the beginning of a transformation in her kitchen.
Like much of the artist’s inspiration, the reptile returned to her in a dream.
In the dream, the turtle lifted off from the countertop. It flew into the tile above the sink with a splat, where it metamorphosed into a bird and flew about the room.
“It was really, really vivid,” Shaw said.
Shaw has lived in Brookline for over 40 years, working as a painter, printmaker and teacher since the ‘90s. A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, she often depicts natural cycles and what her son, Jesse, described as the “Earth being born.”
Now she is working on another project that came to her in a dream. Titled “Stitching Us Whole,” she hopes to show the interactive exhibit in the Boston area as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. The project invites participants to cut apart and reassemble a fabric map of the United States, turning division into a collective act of repair.
It’s rare for Shaw to carry out an idea exactly as it appears in a dream, she said. But both “Stitching Us Whole” and the turtle transformation were so vivid, she had to make the vision come to life.
After the turtle dream, her decision was made on the granite, and the shapeshifting animal became a permanent feature embedded in her countertop. The rest of the renovations had come to a standstill. It was a perfect time, in the kitchen’s mid-construction state, to take down the tiles and paint them.
Every day for a month, she incrementally took all 145 tiles to the Clayroom pottery studio in Coolidge Corner to paint and fire sea turtles swirling phase by phase, into a trail of birds.
The storyline took on a life of its own along the way. Among the birds, one tile features an irritated penguin who asks the turtle what he thinks he’s doing.
“I can fly just like them,” is the turtle’s reply.
While the extended kitchen project was a bit of a tangent from her usual work day, much of her prolific artistic practice begins in a similar place.
At first, Shaw said she tried to catch this dream state by waking up in the middle of the night to paint. But as an art student with two young children, the schedule was unsustainable. She began experimenting with Qigong, an ancient Chinese movement practice that she found replicated dreaming. Over the years she’s continued to incorporate meditation and “energetic techniques” to reach that place without sleeping, in what she calls a “waking dream.”
It was through similar means that Shaw originally overcame her own self inhibition to drawing. Shaw’s early interest in art came to an end in the fourth grade, when her teacher gave her partner all the praise for a mosaic swan, and she quietly decided she lacked talent. She pursued anthropology instead.
“I gave away all of my power,” she said.
Channeling energy
It wasn’t until well after completing her degree and having children, that she started drawing again and enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
She excelled, using her ability to “channel energy” as she developed her painting and printmaking practice, enabling her to draw rapidly and sustain her focus. The process, as she describes it, pulls energy from the earth and sky through her body, and sends it out her hand.
Shaw kept her method a secret throughout school. But after graduating, she saw how many others struggled to access that kind of flow. “People were frustrated and didn’t know how to get into that zone,” she said.
So she started teaching them. Now, meditation is central to her practice as a painter, printmaker, and educator – a way of reaching parts of the mind that are hidden in the unconscious.
Only a few years after graduating, she was awarded the Silvermine-Grumbacher Painting Prize for one of her pieces by the head curator of the Guggenheim Museum. She had a buyer lined up for the painting and was looking at galleries in New York – looking back, it could have been the moment she made her break as an artist, she said. But she hated the prestigious setting.
“I was in that kind of dream place, and I thought all of this would ruin my paintings,” she said.
When the director abruptly left the Guggenheim and canceled the proceedings, Shaw was relieved. She took it instead as a cue to redirect her focus deeper inward. She studied with Shamans, climbed Mount Kailash in Tibet, and in an interactive exhibit, “Tasting Paint,” collaborated with a neuroscientist to understand how the six senses influence creativity.
As people came to be aware of her work among spiritual and meditation groups, monks started visiting her in her home studio in Brookline. Shaw’s partner, Mark Rosen, remembers an occasion when a group of Tibetan monks came over for tea and cookies. Afterward they went upstairs to meditate on Shaw’s paintings, calling them “thangkas,” or sacred scroll paintings in Buddhism.
“Other people paint what’s outside of them already,” Rosen said. “Her images come from inside herself.”
Dreaming bigger
Sophia Corso and her roommate were admiring their neighbor’s “lovely” garden. There was a small cat in the yard, Corso recalled, and they simply had to stop and look. That was when another passerby joined them. She introduced herself as Sloat.
Before long, Corso and her roommate were invited to Shaw’s open studio, and have kept in touch with the artist since. So when Shaw said she needed some help with a new project, the neighbors were happy to come over.
“Sloat is just the kindest and warmest person,” said Corso.
The latest project began, as many do, with a dream – but this one arrived fully formed, startlingly so.
“I was so surprised,” Shaw said. “It seemed so totally not the way that I’ve been working. But this dream just came like a whole picture right away.”
In it, people from all walks of life gathered around a map of the United States. A sheer fabric overlay traced its outline. Participants were cutting up the states, pulling them apart, shredding them, before stitching them back together.
The project, “Stitching Us Whole,” is conceived as a large-scale collaborative work, one Shaw hopes to realize in a gallery setting in time for America’s 250th anniversary.
“Yes, we have a lot of differences in our country,” Shaw said. “But we’re still a united country.”
She invited Corso and her roommates as a trial run, treats from the bakery next door provided of course. The company started to spontaneously sing the state song, Shaw recalled, laughing.
Alabama and Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas.
Shaw is still on the lookout for a space to bring the dream to life on a larger scale. In the meantime she heads up to her third-floor studio day after day, surrounded by old paintings and beginnings of ideas, meditating, dreaming, creating.
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism.