Jahanna 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.
