I have created this website to make it easier to view my work from all places. One important part of my work explores the idea of shifting places and uprooting, as well as social and cultural barriers and loneliness in a world which is becoming more and more global. On the one hand I express my personal experience as a traveller: I live and work in Spain, but I am a New Zealander. On the other hand, I speak about the human condition and its relation to the environment. My work can be divided into various stages and series and for this website I have grouped it into the following sections: works on paper, painting, sculpture and installation. I show the most recent work, but also some key works from earlier on. Lately I am interested in using the human figure in my painting as a direct way of communicating about social and cultural issues. I think we are living in times of a lot of change, both social as well as environmental and it makes a strong theme and driving force for my work. I have chosen painting and sculpture as my medium for communicating these ideas. My surname Shackleton, connects me to the English Antarctic explorer of the same name and I think that in some ways his famous motto runs through my work: “By endurance we conquer”. There is something about Shackleton that has always fascinated and impressed me. His story was about survival in a situation which put both the human spirit and character to test. I often think of the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, `Mountaineer in a misty landscape´, which shows the lone figure of a man standing on the top of a mountain, with his back turned looking out over the land below.
