About

Shane Cox is a visual artist working with sculpture and craft-based processes to explore contemporary relationships with land and material. His practice focuses primarily on wood as a material both natural and engineered as well as native and non-native to the island of Ireland.

His art-making process consists of physical acts performed on a singular material, such as shaving a wooden plank with a draw knife or bending a branch by hand. These human interactions with the material are documented in both sound and video. Through this experimentation, a point of tension emerges between the request made by these acts and the material's potential. A branch breaks or a knot in the wood refuses to be shaved down. 

This stretching of the material's potential and its response forms a collaboration point from which an artwork emerges. Weaving, stitching and balancing are the primary methods used in his sculptural work, avoiding glue or other adhesives that could be used to push past a material's individual potential.