Statement:
I paint monochrome spaces that explore the relationship between movement and materiality. I complete each painting in a singular session to preserve the immediacy of touch and gesture, after weeks of building the perfect surface. There, the act of painting becomes a physical and sensory extension of navigating space, allowing traces of action to be embedded and removed within the painted surface.
Colour functions as a tool rather than a subject. My choices are instinctive, responding to how a colour interacts with space rather than carrying symbolic or representational meaning. My current focus is on greyscale tones and their subtle shifts, reinforcing an elusive and open-ended visual experience. Each hue holds the potential for ambiguity, helping to resist fixed interpretation and allowing the work to hover between the known and unknown.
I seek to create spaces that exist in a state of tension between presence and absence, movement and stillness, material and space. These paintings resist immediate narration, pushing away from imagery to sustain an ambiguous, open encounter. They exist as events and traces, where something is both happening and held, yet suspended in time. These works ask the viewer to slow down, to engage with the subtleties of material and perception, and to find their own moment of stillness within them.
Exhibitions:
2025 AUTO AMOR PROJECT, Auto Amor, Dunton Green, Group Show
2025 MA Interim Show, City & Guilds of London Art School, Group Show
2025 Your Work Here, The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Group Show
2024 Secret Postcard Show 2024, The Old Lock Up Gallery, Derbyshire Peak District, Group Show
2024 Works on Paper, Rush Coffee Group, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Solo Show
2023 Small Works Winter Show 2023, Spring Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Group Show
2023 Freelands Painting Prize 2023, Freelands Foundation Project Space, London, Group Show
2023 Anxiety of Interdisciplinary 2.0, Cambridge University, Group Show
2023 Graduate Showcase, Cambridge School of Art, Degree Show
2023 Midpoint, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, Group Show
2022 Intensify, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Group Show
2022 No Imagination, Unit 15, The Grafton, Cambridge, Group Show
2021 re-emerge, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Group Show
2021 Exposure, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Group Show
Awards:
2024 Leverhulme Scholarship
2023 Dr Supanee Gazeley Fine Art Award 2023
2023 Freelands Painting Prize 2023
Education:
2024-2025 MA Fine Art, City and Guilds of London Art School
2020-2023 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, First Class Honours
Socials and Contact:
Instagram: @chloejess.art
Email: chloe@chloeculley.uk