Luce Gallery is pleased to present Entangled Fragments, Shanee Roe’s second Solo Exhibition with the Gallery, curated by Luisa Seipp.

Fragments of paper accumulate across the studio floor, moved, layered, glued down, drawn upon or torn away again. “This is organised mess,” Shanee Roe says about the process behind her recent collages.

Moving from oil painting towards collage, Roe increasingly allows paper, colour and material to determine the image as it unfolds. Where earlier paintings often developed from drawings and were then translated onto the canvas, these new works resist any such predetermined path. Compositions emerge through this process of assembling and undoing and re-assembling.

This shift introduces a new meaning into Roe's figurative language. Her bodies no longer appear simply depicted but pieced together, their contours formed through cuts, ruptures and overlapping pieces of colour. A face, an arm or a torso might emerge from several independent fragments, the seams between them left visible. Collage thus operates beyond technique – it proposes the body as something relational, continually growing, something reconstructed rather than fixed.

The tension between separation and intimacy runs through all of Roe's work. Her figures touch, embrace, desire and seek one another, yet complete union remains elusive. Roe describes this recurring impulse as a longing for physical connection paired with an inability to ever fully merge. In the new collages, this tension becomes embedded in the very structure of the image – separate pieces meet and overlap without entirely surrendering their boundaries.

Water, recurring throughout her new works, seems to work against these edges. It becomes a blurry space of exchange, unsettling the distinction between interior and exterior, one body and another. Figures seem to enter or contain one another, their bodies becoming permeable while remaining distinct.

Alongside these familiar questions of intimacy and physical connection, another gesture has begun to enter Roe's images. Following the recent birth of her child, smaller bodies and three-figure constellations recur. Even though identifying them as representations of mother, father, and child, Roe understands them more as three souls tangled into each other. In one of her works, a standing figure holds a smaller body against their own while another kneels beside them. Rather than settling into recognisable familial roles, the image draws attention to the gesture itself of holding, supporting, carrying. Care enters alongside desire as another possibility for how one body might relate to another.

Tenderness, however, never resolves into complete comfort. Roe's figures retain something uneasy and ambiguous, resisting both fixed identities and stable relationships.

Perhaps it is precisely this refusal of resolution that connects Roe's new process to the relationships her images contain. Collage brings fragments into contact without requiring them to lose their wholeness. In the same way, the bodies in these works imagine intimacy not only through the desire to dissolve into one another, but through another possibility. Through a closeness that does not depend on becoming one.

Care may therefore mark the most subtle shift in Roe's recent work – not as an iconography of motherhood, but as an expanded understanding of intimacy itself. To hold, carry or support someone is to remain connected while still honouring their very unique wholeness. Like the fragments from which Roe's images are built, these bodies touch, depend upon and transform one another – however, their contours remaining, always, their own.

Dr. Luisa Seipp

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