How Benjamin Shine’s exhibition 3FOLD bends material, meaning and expectation

THERE’S A MOMENT in Benjamin Shine’s story when pattern cutting turns into sculpture. At Central Saint Martins, the British-born, Canberra-based artist began “cutting clothes in unconventional ways,” he tells Esquire. “Whether by eliminating seams or reducing designs to a single piece.” It was a shift that he says makes you think about form and nudges the work away from the body altogether. Fabric stores, he adds, began to feel like “rows of paints or coloured pencils, but with the added qualities of texture and dimension.”

He’s now brought this unconventional perception on materiality to his Sydney debut, 3FOLD, which gathers three new bodies of work – Tulle Paintings, Fold and Nexus – presenting them as a study in transformation via the simplest of actions: the fold. It’s an exhibition that introduces “entirely new formats and materials alongside his internationally acclaimed tulle works,” and is running from 7–21 October 2025 at Art2Muse Gallery, with additional displays at the InterContinental Sydney and further pieces positioned to engage different spaces and light.

Shine frames the show as a gear change after a decade dominated by his signature tulle portraits. “For the best part of a decade, most of my output has been the tulle works,” he says. “I couldn’t have imagined the response they received or the opportunities they generated. But this year, I felt it was time to shift gears and take that medium in a new direction. To open up greater avenues for exploration. I also wanted to dedicate time to exploring other ideas… I feel I’m an inventor at heart, so I’m getting back to inventing and letting the ideas lead the way, unconcerned with matching prior work.”

The title itself carries layered intent. “Yes, in the one sense it refers to something several times greater, which is essentially the result of creative actions; something more significant being achieved,” Shine explains. “It also refers to the underlying physical, constructional component that has informed so much of my work. Namely the fold and material manipulation. As there are three bodies of work being presented together, it seemed the ideal title for the show.”

Tulle Paintings is a rediscovery of a material he made famous, now approached with a painter’s hand. “I was both amazed and frustrated that I hadn’t done it sooner… what took me so long!” he says. The aim he set in 2002 was “to ‘paint’ with fabric,” and this series “really seems to achieve that goal.” The technique “is just like painting,” free of the “tricky limitations” of his single-length tulle method, and required “a fair bit of unlearning”. Including thinking about colour again, “since I actually painted with paint, years ago.”

The exhibition brief notes these compositions create a “translucent impasto effect” with arcs and sweeps that project from the surface, mounted within box frames behind plexiglass, a flat plane becoming dimensional through light and texture.

Fold takes the logic of tulle’s diaphanous geometry and enlarges it into laser-cut metal reliefs that still carry the weightlessness of the original impulse. “These are possibly the pieces I’m most proud of,” Shine says, citing “constructional challenges” and the buzz of doing something he “doesn’t think has been done before.” Fabricators initially laughed at the idea that “multiple folds of this nature couldn’t be done.” He solved it himself: “I’m not a metalworker. But over a few months, I found a way and was delighted to see them realised.”

The background material emphasises how the works begin as flat planes and transform through “simultaneous folding” into dimensional compositions that play with moiré surfaces and bold silhouettes.

Nexus looks soft but behaves like sculpture. “The Nexus works are made using felt, chosen both for its structure and its ability to absorb resin,” Shine explains. “While the material is still pliable, the resin cures and solidifies it, shifting the piece from the realm of textile to that of sculpture. That’s the zone I like these works to inhabit, especially from a practical standpoint.” The series explores “cause and effect” with compositions “dictated by the influence of differently shaped solid blocks on a soft ‘canvas’.”

The exhibition notes describe how pleated felt, compressed between shaped blocks, becomes a visual statement of mass and balance, deep pleats catching light for dramatic shadow play.

For Shine, the fold is method and metaphor. “It’s all of the above,” he says. In his earlier Flow works it operates as meditation, while in Fold it represents potential: “turning something as simple as a flat sheet of fabric or metal into an interesting sculpture.”

Across the show, the connective tissue is explicit. “These three works are all very different,” Shine says, “but… they all stem from the same starting point: the fold.” Viewers can “see the creative evolution and diversity of ideas that arise from different materials and the potential each material offers,” unified by a “shared creative origin.”

In 3FOLD, a crease becomes a thesis on how we perceive depth, texture and materiality. A fold becomes a way of thinking of how the surface of things can be come fluid and bend to the imagination.

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