From the original Festival website:

Taking the 17^thcentury phenomenon of the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, Shaun Caton creates a private museum in miniature in which the mysterious and arcane objects on display take on a metamorphic life of their own (Caton uses real fossils, prehistoric artefacts, deities, quartz crystal beads etc.) through trance induced ink/light drawings and hypnagogic (hallucinatory) projections. Caton works in the curious tradition of the 19^th century preoccupation and interest in mesmerism, tableaux-vivant and psychic automatism, to execute miniscule drawings that can only be viewed with hand held magnifying glasses on loan in his Cabinet.

This durational performance jumps from one reality to another, criss-crossing many historical reference points and merging them to form a unique and disquieting journey. The performance interweaves the ancient with the modern in an alternating cycle of seen/unseen connections. Time and memory become a blurred hinterland of densely layered imagery hinting at the broken fragments of a constantly morphing stratum within a story.

Shaun Caton has presented some 220 performances worldwide since the early 1980s and performed at the NRLA in 1986, 1988 and 2009. He makes no more than four performances a year and focuses on painting, drawing, and book making outside of this. His work has recently been described as “epic primordial performance and shamanic scribbles” – tactileBOSCH, November 2008, and “genuinely terrifying” – The Scotsman

Ten years on, Shaun has now presented over 500 performances worldwide and in 2019 he performed Il Giardino Grottesco in the 58th Venice Biennale.

shauncaton.co.uk