The Cosmic Being and The Universal Humanoid, 2026, are etchings in editions of twenty that translate Shillinglaw’s instinctive drawing language into a medium defined by permanence and precision.
Scratched directly into metal, each line carries a sense of immediacy and commitment, echoing the artist’s fascination with mark-making as both physical act and psychological trace.
Both of them have like an energy of the body. They're both about the body and the mind, and this kind of kinetic, frenetic flux of my mental processing, my bodily functions, the growth and decay of the human body mixed with the stuff around us, you know, the sunlight, dust, noises… It make sense to me.
…it's like the same language as William Blake or other artists that I've seen for years, even Goya. There's certain artists that in my head I think of them as artists who make etchings. And we're going to hand colour some and that really relates to Paul Klee because he did a lot of hand-coloured etchings. So it does feel a bit like I'm standing on the shoulders of giants sort of thing, like speaking in a language that I've been reading for years and now I'm learning that language.
The hand-coloured variations introduce a further dimension to the editions. Rather than functioning as repetition, each work becomes a re-interpretation, allowing the original mark to shift in tone, rhythm, and atmosphere across the series.
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Video courtesy of Dan Fontanelli
Shillinglaw reflects on his intuitive approach to making, shaped by years of exploration and a fascination with human nature, language, and lived experience.
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