Jahnne Pasco-White
From an interview at Melbourne Art Fair, February 2025. https://melbourneartfair.com.au/beyond-jahnne-pasco-white-on-expanding-sensory-experiences-and-her-beyond-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.
TAKE AWAYS: her materials methods of dyeing, staining, assembling, drawing, painting, collage and sewing - are similar to my practice whereby I use dye as the base layer on unprimed canvas, then I repurpose the paintings by ripping them up and sewing them back together. I also have started to collage pre-embroidered table cloth details onto my paintings. I am interested in her considerations around installation - paintings as a body of work, on the floor, hanging loose.
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.
TAKE AWAYS: I have previously tried to use Madder Root and Indigo to stain the canvas and perhaps I should revisit. I would like to use more drawing in my works and have not yet incorporated paper. I do like the eclectic mix of materials and the recycled cloth element.
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