Jo Chate

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

At the centre of Jo Chate’s practice is the exploration of space and how we experience the world we live in, our environment and surroundings. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, and transforming. Starting with photography to capture moments and phenomena from everyday life, she transforms the quotidian to create complex, enigmatic paintings. Alongside working on paintings Chate experiments with painting on prints, found frames and photographs. Working with underpaintings has become part of her methodology often painting over the surface again and again. This formal process is all part of defamiliarising the familiar, absorbing and changing - while creating depth - until the final image evolves incorporating traces from the ones which we can no longer fully see. Having worked in film and having studied human geography, the environment and our relation to it lies at the core of Jo Chate’s practice. Her landscapes are inhabited spaces, even if they appear empty we can feel the presence of protagonists. Chate paints the landscape as having agency, being dynamic and narrating its own story. Throughout her making process dance plays a foundational role. Colour and form is created through her perception and the movement of her body. The choreographic physicality in the making of the work creates rhythm and a sense of movement across the canvas. The paintings carry their own internal rhythm. Jo Chate’s work embraces dualities - balancing structure and chaos,...

Artwork