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Richard Shaw’s sculpture Canton Lady is a whimsical trompe l’oeil, or optical illusion, from 1984. The work is an assemblage of glazed porcelain objects stacked into an abstracted shape of a lanky woman. She is captured mid-stride as she walks across a small, crinkled panel of cardboard with decals on it. She lacks feet, but what would be her left foot is firmly planted slightly in front of her. Her right leg extends behind. Fingers point forward from the ends of both arms. Shaw created the optical illusion by crafting pieces of porcelain into realistic elements that look like something else entirely: a half-eaten round cracker by her left foot, a cigarette butt on the piece of cardboard, the woman herself, all of it painted porcelain. The sculpture stands nearly three feet tall by eight inches wide, reaching just over one-and-a-half feet deep from the back of the cardboard piece to her pointing “fingers” that reach beyond the cardboard just a bit in front. 

The topmost piece is a ridged white carafe stopper, wider at the top for her head and tapering down to a short, narrow neck that ends with a narrow stripe of royal blue. Her body is a taller, smoother piece that mirrors the carafe stopper but upside down. It is narrower on top and widens out in a bell shape to form her belly and hips. This torso is dull and painted with a white wash over gray porcelain with a few small nicks and scrapes. The figure’s unusually long, tan arms are bent. Her right upper arm juts out behind her like a pitcher handle, and the forearm portion is painted to look like wood grain. In place of a right hand is a metallic two-pronged shape like a bottle opener. The end of her left arm has three broken pencils affixed: The thumb has an eraser pointing out, the index finger has a sharpened lead tip pointing out, and the pinky is a blue colored pencil nub, tip pointing toward her wrist. 

Canton Lady gets her name from her micro-mini skirt, made of an upside-down antique white Canton ware bowl. The bowl is decorated blue with a rural scene of homes, a mountain, and a lake. Stretching from the open underside of the bowl are disproportionately long legs. The left leg is like a round dowel rod that ends with a square tip, resembling part of a hockey stick. It is mostly tan with dark brown stripes in front and thin dabs of light blue all around. Her right leg is two parts. The first is porcelain made to look like a square piece of pale wood for the upper thigh, and a slightly longer square length like cork tape is attached by a band of black tape. For the second part, her knee is like blobby cement connecting to a blond-wood baseball bat for her lower leg. Between her feet are two decals. There is a blue-stained newspaper clipping, and on it, a small white paper with “By Samuel Crowther” and rows of blank lines. The porcelain Marlboro cigarette butt rests atop these.