BEYOND | Jahnne Pasco-White On Expanding Sensory Experiences and Her BEYOND Work
Jahnne Pasco-White’s expanded painting practice explores the interconnectedness between humans and our environment. Her work, Embodied watery entanglements II, will be presented at Melbourne Art Fair with STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney), as part of BEYOND, the Fair’s sector for showcasing large-scale installations and spatial interventions. BEYOND is curated by Anna Briers, Curator, Len Lye & Contemporary Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (Aotearoa).
The Fair speaks with Jahnne about harnessing a watery approach to movement in her practice, working with recycled materials, and what to expect from her new work.
Continuous renewing, repurposing, reworking, and mark making seem to be integral aspects of your practice. What is the intention behind this process and the layers of authorship that you cover and uncover?
The expanded painting field has been a productive site for me to explore the relationship between humans and the environment. For this, I draw upon research in disciplines including ecology, feminism, and the field of human relations into conversation with material methods such as natural dyeing, staining, assembling, drawing, painting, collage and sewing. The resulting paintings, themselves often made from repurposed artworks and other recycled everyday materials, also come into relation with one another; both in the process of their making (i.e. I often work simultaneously across multiple works at a time) and compositionally when exhibited in the gallery (i.e. in how and where they are installed, on the floor to be walked on, for example). Put another way, I present works in exhibitions not as individual works but as a collective body of painting.
Into these many surfaces, I introduce segments of old paintings, cut up and reworked in an ongoing cycle of decay and renewal. I am interested in the generative process of creating, and the layers of authorship that are variously revealed and concealed by my continuous process of mark-making, as well as adding, subtracting and reworking old works into new ones. Through these varied approaches to painting what I hope to achieve with my work is an appreciation of the entanglements of the sustaining, contaminating and messy ecosystems that both human and more-than-human bodies inhabit and contribute. This interconnection emerges not only in the overlapping details of matter brought together on the surface but also in how works hang together as bodies and collaborators— cohabitating and intermingling. Composition spans beyond the individual to the collective painting ‘bodies’ where they are both mutating, feeding, and exchanging from one another through material, texture, line, form and colour.
Jahnne Pasco-White, Kinning with Lake 10, 2024, plant based crayons turmeric, oil pastel, watercolour, reclaimed oil paint, coffee, tea leaves, raw pigment, indigo dye, tempura, various plant dyes, acrylic, rice glue, paper, pen, hemp, silk, linen, cotton on canvas, 185.0 x 156.0cm. Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).
What materials do you use in your work?
I collect and recycle old and tired textiles into my work like collage. I primarily work with natural textiles as I also work with natural seasonal dyeing. Hand dyed fabrics pigmented with organic materials gathered from my surroundings including domestic debris and matter collected from the natural environment – are complemented by acrylic paint, oil stick, pastel, pencil, old drawings, watercolours, receipts, tags, plastic, flowers, plant matter, seeds, bamboo, felt, hemp, old cotton thread etc.
Recalling your work Milky ways for Maternal Inheritances and Embodied watery entanglements, their scale seems to envelop and immerse the viewer. Can you elaborate on the importance of scale in your practice?
In each of these site-specific installations I used a variety of textiles to expand the sensorial experience. These immersive installations aim to reconfigure the experience of painting beyond image making but to consider how one’s body relates to its environment. In this way attention between fine details through to the larger installation shifts constantly between the macro and micro scales.
Water is in a constant state of transformation just as bodies are. Harnessing this watery approach to movement, change and porosity has become core to my painting practice. Here, across exhibitions, studios and time scales paintings can resurface, sink, or float among each other. They can ingest, mutate, become a multitude, separate, and reinvent themselves. Like porous bodies being both absorbed by and absorbing the world, this painting practice is too. Moving between various scales, the detail and installation, these paintings, through their intermingling of layers, materials and collective gathering can offer ideas of regeneration, interconnectedness, decay and most importantly a method of continual questioning because I realise, my habitat is in movement.
Jahnne Pasco-White, Embodied watery entanglements, 2022, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).
How do you approach a new body of work? Does it start with an idea, a material, a feeling? Or is it something different each time?
An old body of work is usually the starting place for the new body. Like the skin cicadas leaves as the head for the trees I usually pick up the scraps and that is the beginning of the new life. Sometimes its cutting old works up, other times its working on the opposite side, it might be a stained piece of material that becomes the way towards new work. I am interested in responding to particular spaces that inform how I think of the larger body of work as a whole. I think of my works as bodies; in this way they are ever changing, they are porous, have scars, watermarks and stories to tell. The painting bodies archive the many material encounters.
Can you expand on your interest in exploring the interconnection between humanity and our environment?
I am committed to an environmental position which situates my body as enmeshed and co-constituted with other living and non-living beings and things. I work with materials that have flowed in and out of use and disuse. For me, the fluidity of these material forms—the plant dyes, viscous rice glue, painterly washes, cutting up and re-using old works and feeding them into new paintings—all speak to the cyclical and porous flows that connect my body to the painting. Water is emerging as the connector between how I paint, why I am increasingly making work, and my environmental consciousness. By situating water as the connective flow through my work I embody the interconnection of all life, through temporal and material scales, aiming to mesh my environmentalism with material practice. This approach has shaped processes of art making that is underpinned by an attunement with currents of my ever-transforming environment. In the studio, water flows through the processes of natural dyeing, staining, assembling, drawing, collaging, and sewing to explore both the material and temporal limits of a painting practice. These processes connect colour to a surface and right back to layers of deep geological time that occurs within the development of mineral pigments where waters presence is vital. Water informs connections through the methods of making, environmental position, and my embodiment, revealing to me their entanglement with one another. To think and make with this watery attunement becomes a practice that intimately connects my existence with other living bodies and proposes a set of ethical questions of how my actions are implicated with others’ lives, both human and more-than-human.
Jahnne Pasco White, installation view, STATION. Photo: Jessica Maurer.
What can we expect to see from your work for the BEYOND sector at Melbourne Art Fair?
This body of work aims to be an immersive painterly encounter. The work is about including the smears, the stains of living, the Western concept of waste and inverting this into a vital component of the assemblage. It is a soupy gathering of the generative and toxic flows of living in the world today and putting into question how to co-exist. It’s a material engagement that seeks to prioritise the imperfections that make up the world. From soaking acacia seeds and flowers to boiling avocado stones in a pot of water to gathering the dusty pink hues, painting becomes a form of haptic engagement with the world, a method of archiving my material encounters like a digestive system. I think about the studio as fostering waves of compost where material in one form is gathered or accumulated, where under the right conditions they are transformed to a third form. There is no order over paint, sock scraps, or turmeric powder as it becomes more about what unfolds when they meet entangled upon or staining each other’s skins. It is painting in relation to other paintings which nourishes the idea that the individual does not operate without a larger eco-system. For me, painting is more than a pictorial image as it operates both with and beyond a visual register. It becomes a touching-feeling way of being in the world.
Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February 2025. Click here to secure tickets.
