OCT 25 | David Shillinglaw

David Shillinglaw (b. 1982, London) is a British artist whose work explores the intricate terrain of the human condition and the restless balance between order and chaos. A graduate of Central Saint Martins (2002), Shillinglaw’s practice is rooted in experimentation and a playful, intuitive approach to create a unique visual language.

Working across painting, drawing, collage, and installation, he constructs vibrant and vital compositions that reflect the contradictions of contemporary life — where freedom and confinement, clarity and confusion, humour and anxiety coexist. His works are structured yet spontaneous, mapping the tension between control and disorder, safety and uncertainty, mirroring our collective search for meaning in a world that resists definition.

This search for structure moves from the macro to the micro in his works, from our will to understand entire universes right down to our own lives and the troubles within them. Recurring throughout his practice are the ideas of mapping and psychogeography. Like cartographers of emotion, his forms and texts resemble mental maps — ways of navigating personal and collective experience. These spatial structures reflect humanity’s constant urge to create order, to mark boundaries, to find home or belonging, while simultaneously confronting the inevitability of movement, migration, and change.

Shillinglaw’s portraits reveal the human being as a collage of contradictions — part Frankenstein, part philosopher, part map of emotion. Figures emerge from an intricate web of lines, as if charting the pathways of thought and feeling. Both fragile and monumental, they suggest a search for coherence within chaos, embodying the tension between body and mind, reason and instinct. His practice embraces imperfection and celebrates process over finality, guided by Carl Jung’s words: “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”

Shillinglaw lives and works in Margate, UK. Only Human, developed during a month-long residency in Lisbon, delves into the emotional landscapes of modern life — celebrating empathy, spontaneity, and the beautifully imperfect nature of being alive.

"All my work is about describing space: the internal space of my mind; the organs and systems under my skin; the physical spaces I inhabit, from rooms, to gardens and trains. This stretches out to the internet or cyber space, the space of a city, a country or continent—the planet as a whole. Perhaps the hardest to comprehend is ‘outer space’. I find it almost impossible to imagine its dark vastness. I find something compelling about trying to explore these ideas through drawing, painting and collage. Like a caveman scratching a constellation on a muddy wall, I construct maps to navigate impossible terrains. " David Shillinglaw