Jo Chew

For Tasmanian painter Jo Chew, the house is a powerful metaphor.

The first time I saw Jo Chew’s paintings, I immediately begged a mutual friend to introduce us. It was at the 2010 Tasmanian College of the Arts graduate show and as part of her third-year submission, Chew created a suite of small paintings of tree houses and three-legged dogs—a series that, in retrospect, she sees as self-portraits. In Optimism, 2010, a three-legged dog stands next to a pile of books, while a reproduction of her son’s crude drawing of a house sits in the corner. A single flowering plant sprouts from the harsh pebbly ground, a symbol of hope and renewal. The subject was inspired by her now ex-husband’s criticism of her pile of unread books. “You’re like a three-legged dog—you’re limiting yourself by not reading those books,” he told her. The dogs in her paintings initially stood as “a reference to being broken or damaged, missing a leg;” however, in the process of collecting images on the internet, Chew realised that “three-legged dogs are very capable and amazing.”

Soon after graduating, Chew had her first solo commercial exhibition in 2012 at Hobart’s Despard Gallery. The title, It’s Gonna Be (Alright), was taken from a Ween song, as were all the painting titles, which not only solved the difficulty of coming up with names for all the works, but also provided “some relief from the seriousness of art.” This playfulness and optimism still exists in her work today, as do many of the themes explored in this first solo, even if the construction and complexity of the paintings has evolved. In addition to the three-legged dog, notions of safety, trust, and vulnerability continue to be explored through the presence of domestic architecture, tents, bird houses, and other shelters.

At Chew’s current studio at Contemporary Art Tasmania, paper collages are pinned to the wall, composite images yet to be “stitched” into a painted form. She started using the process of collage to construct her images as an undergraduate, creating elaborate sets that would then be translated into a painting. For Chew, the painting process is a form of mending, of stitching the image together. She cites Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer’s 1978 essay on femmage as a significant influence, an essay that not only contested the notion that Picasso and Braque “invented” collage, but also linked collage to notions of care and personal storytelling. Chew says she “likes the idea that collage has its roots in a nurturing feminine impulse.” Her paintings frequently incorporate samples or patterns drawn from family items in the spirit of femmage, such as illustrations from books that “lined the walls” of her grandparents’ home and “woven paper from a treasured journal handed down to my grandmother and then to me.”

This sampling of imagery from family heirlooms can be seen in paintings to be shown in her upcoming solo exhibition at Despard Gallery in September. The patterned backdrop to the blanket fort depicted in Learning, 2024, is inspired by the woven paper found in her family’s nineteenth century journal. Both Turf, 2024, and Between Heaven and Earth, 2024, incorporate imagery from a children’s book of Dutch verses inherited from her grandparents. The stormy sky in Turf stands out for its monochrome lines, a contrast to the brightly coloured house hiding behind a fortress-like fence. The title refers to Durer’s Great Piece of Turf, 1503, which Chew has replicated in the foreground. The contrasting styles, particularly the flattened sky, is designed to create tension. “It feels like a storm is brewing, geopolitically and [in terms of] climate,” Chew notes. In Between Heaven and Earth, the composition is flipped, with the sampled picture book image reproduced as a swirling body of water in the foreground, disrupting traditional rules of perspective. The lean-to house—a higgledy-piggledy construction of wood, patterned fabric, and corrugated iron—already looks precarious enough, but as Chew notes, the addition of the swirling water is destabilising, further emphasising the “feeling like it’s going to collapse.”

While Chew’s representation of homes—whether they be human houses, bird houses, treehouses, or tents—is often inspired by found images, the subject of homes and housing is quite personal. “Growing up I felt a secure sense of home and place,” she notes, and yet as a single parent in a city experiencing a housing crisis, Chew has faced housing precarity first-hand. Following a period living in Sydney, she says, “I was conscious when I moved back to Hobart [in 2018] following a family breakdown how close I was to homelessness . . . I was deeply aware of home as something uncertain and precarious at an emotional level. More generally it seems that housing has shifted since my grandparents bought their home, from something that offered security and a safe place to all or at least most, to a money-maker for those with and something out of reach for those without.”

Painting was cathartic for the artist during this time and despite her difficulties, Chew’s career has gone from strength to strength since returning to Tasmania. Last year, she finished her PhD, titled, Displacement, repair, and the painted collage: a studio-based investigation of the precarity of home. Chew cites her grandparents’ home, “an ever-present backdrop to their lives,” as a catalyst for her PhD project. When they died, their relatively large Hobart block was sold to developers, while the physical house was acquired and relocated off-site. No wonder Chew says she “gravitates toward images of dwellings that are makeshift, collaged, or assembled together, or temporary like tents or tree houses or blanket forts.”

The “walking house” has been a recurring motif in Chew’s work since 2019, inspired by the story of a rural Chinese man, Liu Lingchao, who built a portable house of bamboo and plastic sheeting, allowing him a nomadic life. Chew stumbled upon the story and image “by accident, but it resonated with me as a metaphoric image.” She says, “It was such a strange and beautiful image, it seemed to encapsulate an idea of home as something felt and carried.” Moving, 2022, a finalist in the 2022 Churchie Emerging Art Prize, features the walking house superimposed over a roughly painted snowy mountain backdrop, seemingly disconnected from the harsh landscape. The walking house in Coda, 2024, while more grounded, is precariously close to the edge of a cliff, emphasising the structure’s vulnerability.

Chew says that the meaning of her works become clear through the process of making, which is often intuitive. “Retrospectively, I’ll think ‘oh it’s about that,’” she says. She points to Growing Blind, 2022, a painting of a camouflage hunting blind used to shoot birds, which “feels like a really unjust thing.” It was only after finishing the painting that Chew connected it to the then recent incident of domestic violence in which one of her friends was murdered by her ex-husband, despite attempts to get a restraining order. “I saw the injustice. It also felt like a memorial,” she says. While hunting blinds are often hidden amongst bushes, Chew relocates the structure to the middle of a great sea, where it could be viewed as a refuge to the vulnerable. By using the shelter as a metaphor, Chew’s memorial is subtle and deeply thoughtful, even while it draws attention to an extraordinarily horrific and violent story that remains worryingly topical. The painting won the emerging category in the 2022 Women’s Art Prize.

Last year Chew won the Glover Prize for landscape painting with an artwork that didn’t conform to a traditional landscape format. “The landscape is a political landscape,” Chew argues. Chew’s winning work, Tender, 2022, depicts a caravan and striped tent, similar to those the artist witnessed at the showgrounds in Hobart’s north. “I remember seeing prize cows at the showgrounds as a kid. [Now kids are] growing up there in tents and caravans.” A fence separates the camp from a sea of suburban roofs, their pointed tips just visible beyond the barrier. While the human occupants are absent, an abandoned crab toy hints at the presence of a family. A three-legged dog gazes across the raw earth foreground, while the weedy plants in the foreground are reproduced from a pastoral painting by the prize’s namesake, John Glover. The mountain that towers over Hobart, kunanyi | Mount Wellington, is painted like a black and white line drawing and is based on another drawing by Glover. Flattened and disconnected, the backdrop is akin to a film set. Chew’s use of provisional or incomplete painting is a deliberate strategy, used to enhance the feeling of precarity. Chew compares the process to poetry, “You don’t have to say everything. You leave gaps.”

Despite growing up in Tasmania where the natural landscape is ever present, Chew rarely depicts the local landscape directly, preferring to create composite images that are “imagined and fictional.” However, she acknowledges the Tasmanian landscape “informs” her work. “Even when I borrow imagery from a painting from the other side of the world, I feel like there’s a familiarity from being here that comes through in the work.” When Tasmanian places do appear in her work, such as the Frenchmans Cap in Moving Mountains, 2023, the iconic mountain is deliberately recontextualised and almost unrecognisable due to the process of collage. The usual bushwalking tents are gone; instead, a “walking house” appears impossibly mirrored in the sky, as if the mountain and the neighbouring Lake Tahune have moved in defiance of its glacial roots.

As she works towards multiple exhibitions in late 2024, Chew says “I feel like I’m painting the same thing that I’ve been painting for a while. But it excites me so I’m going to keep doing it.” Increasingly, she’s been working on unstretched canvas for its provisional associations. “Like a tent—it can be rolled up and put away,” she observes. Ultimately, Chew believes the house is like our lives, “our lives are temporary. Things aren’t permanent.”

This profile was originally published in issue 68, Artist Profile 

EXHIBITION
One For Sorrow, Two For Joy
18 September – 12 October 2024
Despard Gallery, Hobart