artShane
artShane is the working name of Shane, an artist and designer based at Worstead in Norfolk. He first studied art at technical college in Broadstairs, then photography at Bournemouth College of Art and Design. He has freelanced for the past two decades after the birth of his eldest child. Much of his practice is community-focused: he has collaborated with local schools, charities and festivals, and permanent works of his are installed on the Worstead railway station platform building. His fine art is made in mixed media using a self-devised technique he terms 'heat-press collage', in which photographs, ink work, drawing and digital imaging are combined, and delicate inked films are collaged and fused onto canvas under extreme heat so that every original is unique. The process evolved over some 30 years from making light-sensitive silver emulsion on watercolour paper, on which photographs were printed and then painted over. Alongside the originals, he issues extremely limited-edition prints, some taken from existing collages and some conceived as print-only pieces. He opens his shed studio to the public for North Norfolk Open Studios.
Artist Statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist whose art is defined by the development of an original heat-press collage methodology. This self-devised process integrates photography, ink, drawing, digital imaging, and traditional collage, collapsing distinctions between analogue and digital production. Through this hybrid approach, different visual languages are fused into cohesive, complex compositions.
My work is rooted in the paradox of living with an all-powerful imagination inside an unreliable body. As an artist with rheumatoid arthritis, I move through a world where pain, fatigue, and physical limitation are constant companions. My body resists me, but my mind does not. Creativity becomes both refuge and rebellion - proof that while my joints may stiffen, my inner world remains expansive, agile, and free.
Through collage, I fragment and rebuild reality, mirroring my own lived experience. Disparate images, textures, and symbols are layered into new narratives, allowing me to escape the confines of pain and reconstruct meaning on my own terms. My heat-press collage art gives me permission to work non-linearly, to pause, return, rearrange - honouring a body that cannot always perform consistently while celebrating a creativity that never stops adapting. These works are not about suffering; they are about transcendence. They assert that human creativity is profoundly powerful - capable of reshaping limitation into vision, and pain into possibility.
My subject matter are the ghosts of creatives who walked before us: the anonymous hands that created round-tower churches, for instance, and the craftspeople who carved wood, shaped flint, and laid stone. I am interested in the makers rather than the monuments, the labour behind the form rather than the authority that claims it.
I look to the workers who built the stately home or shaped the landscape, not the owner, but the intelligence embedded in the act of making. I look to the solitary eccentric who nails together a beach hut, insisting on individuality through improvisation. These are my subjects. These are my people.
It is the imagination that takes power, not the powerful.