// Current and upcoming projects
Pieceworks and parts
Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane
18 June – 8 July 2025
Jo Chew’s paintings are infused with hope, with memories of shelter and the necessity of making what you can, with what you have. They reach backward and forward in our lives; they come from play and are pitched in the real. They straddle a line of warning and resilience and understand that we make our shelters in our minds just as much as we make them with our hands.
Contemporary Tasmanian Women Artists
Curated by Natasha Bradley-Cross
Despard Gallery, Hobart
2 – 26 April 2025
Despard Gallery is pleased to present a special curated exhibition bringing together six multi-generational, multi-disciplinary emerging and early career Tasmanian women artists. Now in its second iteration, the exhibition showcases a diverse range of creative approaches and mediums, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, jewellery and ceramics, featuring new works by Jo Chew, Samantha Dennis, Ileigh Hellier, Rosanagh May, Cassie Sullivan and Sophie Witter.
The exhibition presents an exploration of how we define our sense of place, including how both our public and private relationships to our environment are forged through personal experience. This includes drawing inspiration from the strong sense of community, dynamic ideas and spaces that are unique to Tasmania, such as its waterways, wildlife, bushland, artists, musicians and spirit. Specific inquiries look towards the suffering or plight of animals and the environment, highlighting a lack of empathy and urgency to protect those we share place with. Others conjure up feelings of life, death, loss and heartache, reflecting on intergenerational history, personal relationships and how creative processes can become cathartic, allowing us to sit with something uncomfortable and in time turns into quietude and strength.
What underpins each artist’s practice and unites their individual objectives, is a strong social conscious and shared sense of responsibility for the people, places and natural world, which provides unending inspiration.
MIXTAPE
Piomena Gallery, Launceston
Mixtape officially opened at Poimena Gallery last Thursday evening, celebrating our 2025 Artist in Residence Jo Chew. Jo worked closely with the TCE Art Students during term 1, lending her expertise and valuable insight. Sam Woolcock hosted an Art Auction on the night raising funds for the Walkathon Charity. A big thank you to Sam, Jo, Tony Curran and the Art Captains for making it happen!
Artist in Resident
Launceston Church Grammar School
February-March 2025
Jo Chew has been awarded as the 2025 Artist in Resident at Launceston Church Grammar School. During her stay she will be working with the TCE students to develop works that respond to a quote by Angus Martin, “from music people accept pure emotion, but from art they demand explanation.”
Sawtooth ARI 25th Anniversary Fundraiser
26 April 2024
Sawtooth ARI are celebrating their 25th birthday next Friday, 26 April 2024, from 6-9pm. For the occasion, Sawtooth have culminated a collection of 25+1 artists living and working in Lutruwita and beyond to create 25+1 limited edition prints of 25. Sawtooth are aiming to raise $25,000 which will be matched by Creative Australia through their Plus1 matched funding application success.
ARTISTS: Alex Davern + Amber Koroluk-Stephenson + Angela Casey + Benjamin Baker + Bianca Templar + Bonnie Starick + Chee Yong + Clara Martin + Emily-Rose Wills + Emma Magnusson-Reid + Fernando Do Campo + Jo Chew + Joel Crosswell + Julie Gough + Katie Barron + Lex Palmer-Bull + Liam James + Neil Haddon + Olly Read + Rob O’Connor + Rod Gardner + Sarah Rhodes + Tony Curran + Tricky Walsh + Troy Ruffels + Zara Sully
Sawtooth ARI have been working with esteemed print makers Hound & Bone to produce high quality archival prints on Canson Printmaking Rag, 308gsm. Paper dimensions are A2 (594 x 240mm), image dimensions 400 x 500mm.
Figure Holding Ground - Opening and Floor Talk
5.30pm, Friday 9 August
Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart
Join curator, Dr. Feranado do Campo, and artist Jo Chew and Marion Abraham for an exhibition floor talk.
Figure Holding Ground
Curated by Fernando do Campo and Michael Edwards
10 August – 21 September 2024
Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart
Featuring: Marion Abraham, Mia Boe, Jo Chew, Sam Field, Brent Harris, Pat Hoffie, Helen Johnson, Jelena Telecki and Nicole Zhang. Figure Holding Ground brings together new paintings by Australian artists who push the speculative and critical possibilities of figurative painting today.
While there is an accepted global return to figuration and market forces repeat and sustain the genre’s commercial presence, there are also exciting new ways that contemporary painters are negotiating the potential of figuration, and particularly how figurative painting is being negotiated in this country. Artists borrow from multiple histories of painting to give sense to a subject, they experiment across diverse material approaches, they situate the figure within socio-political contexts and speculative pasts and futures. Ultimately, the nine painters in Figure Holding Ground unsettle both viewers and subjects through the endless potential of how a figure can ‘hold’ a ground.
The global shift away from a predominantly white male art domain towards embracing diverse artists and subjects has reignited figurative painting’s potential to tell stories, ask critical questions, and represent history, society, community. Figure Holding Ground asserts that any painting – particularly those holding the human figure within a pictorial space proposing a real-world imaginary – is loaded with politics.
Finalist, The Incinerator Art Award
Art for Social Change
13 September - 24 November 2024
The Incinerator Art Award is a nationally recognised exhibition dedicated to the theme of Art for Social Change.
The Award pays homage to Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin—whose studio designed the Essendon incinerator in 1929—who believed art and architecture are ethical enterprises that should aim to bring about positive social change.
A makeshift dwelling is partially excised to reveal an illustration for a poem called 'A ship in distress'. This graphic illustration was from a book of children's verse read to me as a child by my grandparents. Housing has shifted dramatically since my grandparents bought their modest house on moving to Australia in the 50s. Houses then were a refuge from the world, a place for renewal and care. Now housing is about investment, with a widening gap between those with more than they need and those without. This painting was part of a body of work that addressed ideas of shelter, displacement, and possibilities of repair. There is evidence of care in the homeless dwelling depicted - bunting, an umbrella, and a stereo - demonstrating a universal need to make a home. The provisional painting and installation of the work mirrors the precarious and fragile reality of shelter for many.
ARTIST PROFILE
Feature Article by Lucy Hawthorne
Issue 68, 2024
Thrilled to be featured in this issue of Artist Profile.
Image courtesy Remi Chauvin
Winner, Glover Prize 2023
Falls Park Pavilion in Evandale, Tasmania
10-19 March, 2023
Jo Chew has won the 2023 Glover Prize for her painting Tender. Tasmanian-based artist, wins $75,000 for the painting, which depicts a three-legged dog standing in front of a tent and caravan, a commentary on the accessibility of the housing market.
In her artist’s statement, Chew describes how “Images of tents and caravans were frequently in the news at the beginning of 2018 when my daughter and I moved back to Hobart. We lived with my parents for a year, unable to find a rental we could afford. It was easy to see why more and more people were forced into solutions like setting up a temporary home at the Showgrounds – an option that will cease within the coming months.”
The 2023 Prize is judged by Suzanne Cotter, director of Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Tasmanian artist Lucienne Rickard, and director of Niagara Gallery, William Nuttall.
Suzanne Cotter says of the winning piece, “It is a complex painting that addresses contemporary life and themes of home and belonging at the same time as it speaks to a history of painting and the figure of John Glover himself, whose landscapes can be understood as a search for self-recognition in a world that was not his own.”
Image: Tender, oil on linen, 183 x 127cm
Finalist, The Churchie Emerging Art Prize
Curated by Elena DiasJayasinha
Instistute of Modern Art, Brisbane
2 September, 2022
Jo Chew’s walking house series (ongoing) responds to experiences of displacement. Across the paintings, a figure carries a portable home over challenging terrain, inspired by the story of Liu Lingchao, the ‘Snail Man’. Lingchao gained attention for his portable house made from bamboo poles and plastic sheets. He carried the house on his back during three-day trips from his hometown Guangxi to the capital city Liuzhou, where he collected rubbish to sell for recycling. Drawing on this story, Jo explores the vulnerability of displacement but retains a sense of hope— she contemplates ‘home’ as a practice we carry instead of a physical place. The artist’s optimism is extended through process. Jo bases her paintings on small collage studies, whereby ‘exiled’ fragments are brought together into the ‘new home’ of the overall composition.
2017 Fellowship recipient, Anglican Deaconess Ministries, Sydney
ADM Fellowships support women who demonstrate excellence and leadership in their field of intellectual, creative, cultural or professional endeavour, to undertake a focused project and to pursue avenues for engaging the public with their work.
Jo Chew's project 'Numbering Stars' will focus on the creation of a new body of paintings based on stage-like dioramas and assemblages to be exhibited in 2017 and 2018. The first exhibition of these paintings will be held at Thienny Lee Gallery in June 2017. Opening night Thursday June 1 from 6-8pm