Conversations With Yourself About Yourself | David Shillinglaw

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BIO

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.

“ONLY HUMAN” - David Shillinglaw’s solo exhibition, featuring a completely new body of work developed during his three-week artistic residency in Lisbon, Portugal.

ONLY HUMAN | David Shillinglaw

"We are lost in a labyrinth we have created for ourselves. Making maps of emotional terrain. Build it up, break it down, fill it up, empty it out, medicate, meditate, fighting, biting, eat, drink, devour, destroy. We are Frankenstein, and we are the monster — transforming, evolving, growing, decaying. We are atoms agreeing, we are only human: anxious, angry, hideous, hilarious, desperate, doubtful, detached, brave. Celebrate the process, the progress, of cosmic imperfections.” — David Shillinglaw

In this new body of work, Shillinglaw opens up and draws from the raw and playful spirit of his sketchbooks, where process is valued over perfection, and unfinished thoughts are celebrated as much as resolved images. The exhibition becomes a visual narrative of emotions, and ideas — a landscape of fragments — spaces where questions are more important than the answers. 

The structure of language, and the human capacity for abstract thinking constitute a fundamental layer of this exhibition. Shillinglaw is aware that he plays with language to construct reality — he creates new realms on canvas, loaded with visual codes to break and decipher. The artist draws attention to the semiotic properties of language that allow us to understand and name the reality we find ourselves in.

Monoprints are an integral part of Shillinglaw's artistic residency in Lisbon. These pieces embody the rhythm of trial and error, echoing the way humans grow through experimentation, mistakes, and reinvention. His works weave fragments of text with marks, images, and symbols, creating a powerful extension of the mind: an open terrain of memory and imagination.

In Only Human, the artist confronts the turbulence of our times — climate anxiety, global confusion, information overload, and emotional burnout — while inviting viewers to reflect on their own contradictions, coping mechanisms, and belief systems, locating themselves in the space between the personal and the universal.

Using a unique visual language, the works celebrate vulnerability, humor, and the struggle with the very fact that we live in these chaotic and uncertain times. “We are both the problem and the solution,” says Shillinglaw, as he wrestles with the world, poking at paradoxes and leaning into ideas of forgiveness — of ourselves, the generations before us, and the generations to come — for the damage done to each other and to the planet. Empathy becomes the guiding force, drawing maps that use compassion as a compass.

The exhibition transforms the gallery space into a curious and playful environment — echoes of snakes and ladders and ancient hieroglyphics, layered compositions become spaces to get lost in rather than windows to look through. Here, Shillinglaw builds up and breaks down borders and boundaries in a visual dance between destruction and construction, offering playful and poetic alternatives to the structures we have set in stone. 

We are the only species capable of shaping the world in such extraordinary ways, yet we are still full of mistakes. However far we go, we are — all of us — only human.

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