Chair Person with Small Walking Man, 2022

The ‘chair people’ have been an ever-present theme throughout Shenstone’s career: “The chair dwells in a historical world. Everyone who has sat in it has left some kind of memory in the chair. It lives through time and accommodates people who want to use it, and that ingratiates it to me.” Chair and person are intertwined as a single sinuous being, each with their own affable character and seemingly straddling the real and non-physical world. These works unfold with hits of drama, of humour, the macabre, of pain, and all sorts of fleshy humanness in between. We’re all in there somewhere.