STATEMENT OF WORK

At the centre of Jo Chate’s practice is the exploration of space and how we experience the world in which we live, the environment and our surroundings. Starting with the artist’s own photography as source material she uses the camera to capture things seen, moments glimpsed and phenomena from everyday life. 

The beginning of the paintings are manifested through photography. In an experimental way Chate paints on her own photographs, on prints and on frames alongside canvases. She will very often paint over the surface again and again, working with underpaintings has become part of her methodology. All these ideas; painting over prints, frames and underpaintings are all part of the same process of defamiliarising the familiar, absorbing and changing, all while creating depth, until the final image evolves from the ones gone before which we can no longer fully see. 

Her landscapes are human, inhabited spaces even if they appear empty or devoid of the human figure. At the core of Chate’s practice lies the environment and our relationship to it, having studied Geography, which has informed her practice, the paintings can be seen as contemporary psychological landscapes, often devoid of the human figure but presence is nevertheless felt.

Visually compelling and brimming with colour, they create a heightened sense and evoke emotional intensity. She taps into all the senses and the viewer is invited to experience the paintings with their senses. The need to experience in this way can be traced to an early childhood experience of having acoustic problems where she had to activate all the other senses in order to relate, to experience, to understand.

The work embodies dualities and enigmatically counterbalances structure and expression, abstract and figuration, interiority and the exterior, mental space and the real. All the elements are fluid and tangible, they conjure and collide with an emotional intensity, creating complexities and a connectedness that is not easily definable (and eludes any attempt at classification).

The intensity is created through the physicality in the making of the work. Chate’s formal process is performative and dance forms part of this practice. The synthesis of colour and form is created by her perception and movement. The paintings carry their own internal rhythm. The choreographic physicality in the making of the work creates the rhythm and a sense of movement across the canvas. The surface is activated translating internal space into visual terms.

In an attempt to communicate something other than representation, Chate’s paintings go someway beyond depiction or language toward a re-imagining of the world. They are familiar and strange with an emotional intensity imbued. The paintings ultimately become the site of transformation; refracting and colliding memories with future recollections.