Jahnne Pasco-White’s paintings have always had a sculptural element to them; she experiments with the layers and folds of loose canvases, which she plasters with wax, resin and found materials.
“I feel like I’ve been fighting a bit with painting, and feeling like it’s not enough,” she says. But while creating this new body of work, Pasco-White’s enthusiasm for painting has renewed.
The Melbourne-based artist has been thinking of consumption – and thus waste – and that has been the impetus behind these paintings. Her strong ethics and sense of responsibility have become more pronounced since having a child recently. It’s a topic that is at once confronting and complex, and as an artist she’s all too aware of how her own practice may contribute to an ever-growing waste problem.
Here, Pasco-White has collected and worked materials like old clothes and other detritus into these canvases, a way of turning the dual acts of consumption and creation in painting into a regenerative process by reusing offcuts and rerouting missteps.
Her approach of painting by accretion abstracts the layers of discarded matter, turning them into beautiful, meandering compositions. “Because of the layering, many different paintings have existed, and many have gone as well,” she says.
With this new body of work Pasco-White also plays with the limits of scale. This exhibition is comprised of individual panels each around two metres wide that will wrap around the gallery space at Daine Singer. Pasco-White has created them to feel like one work, and as though the viewer is inside the painting.
The wide array of colours and tones Pasco-White has used are a departure from the blues and yellows that dominated earlier work. These paintings are bright, earthy, and corporal. They are “quite bodily” tones, she says – hinting again at regeneration and the possibility of new growth.
Jahnne Pasco-White
Daine Singer
27 February – 30 March
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