The Terminus

The hand-drawn soft-ground etching technique renders these everyday scenes strikingly unfamiliar, an effect which the artist found very attractive. Shaw draws his subject matter from the Tile Hill estate, near Coventry, where he grew up. Working from an archive of photographs he took of the estate, Shaw constantly revisits the scenes of his adolescence. In The Terminus, the subject of the curved road intrigued Shaw, because it is continuous line, going in and out of the image: “This is clearly what the images is about. It’s been chopped in half – you’ve been prevented from turning round – the way the image is cropped the terminus ends – it’s the end – you have been denied the ability to come back round, which symbolizes time in a way – memory – time only works in one way: you can’t turn round.”