PAINTING NOW | Jo Chew

In the painted worlds of Nipaluna/Hobart-based artist Jo Chew, built forms become vessels for an open-ended meditation on vulnerability, hopefulness, loss and longing. “A poem doesn’t need to describe everything and a song doesn’t need to make sense – I feel it can be the same with a painting,” says the artist, whose vibrant, sun-dappled paintings derive from collaged compositions; fragmentary photographs, drawings and found references spliced together “in the hope of finding something that speaks to me.”

This process achieves an almost trompe-l’œil effect, with her large-scale paintings retaining a collagistic sense of pictorial layering in space – an illusory interweaving of paper and paint, memory and material. In doing so, her practice breathes new life into the medium, in step with the curatorial ambitions of Painting Now.

Despite the work’s compelling ambiguities, themes slowly coalesce through Chew’s Painting Now series, in which house-like structures repeat in various guises and take on poetic resonance. Whether temporary and improvisational – tents and makeshift A-frames – or suggesting past visions of a future utopia – modernist dream houses and geodesic domes – her recurring pitched forms invoke a universal language of shelter, inviting reflections on our longing for refuge and a place to call home.

Brought to life during her final months in her long-term home, Chew’s exploration of how we dwell and what we treasure is tinged with a quiet acceptance of transience. “It doesn’t mean things or places can’t be treasured,” she says. “Just that nothing is really ours to keep.” The artist notes a nostalgic thread running through her constructed images: “A desire to get something back that we can’t quite retrieve,” she says. “But they’re not dark or depressing; I think there’s an appreciation for something from the past and an optimism that something similar might still be found. Many of my works this year have a feeling of something hidden and forming, suggesting a period of rest and reflection; cocoon-like, perhaps.”

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au

Explore more from Painting Now HERE.