Jahnne Pasco-White | Embodied Watery Painting

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

This talk will draw upon the contemporary hydro-feminism of Astrida Neimanis to reconfigure water in relation to the body and artmaking. It will consider the material demands of Pasco-White's painting practice, exploring the ways in which water carries embodied, relational, and toxic flows. Whereby artmaking becomes a conduit to explore her relations with water in the broadest possible sense. Locating this research—and her practice—within an embodied watery methodology, water operates both conceptually and practically by pooling connections and surfacing tensions between my methods of making, environmental ethics, and watery embodiment.

Pasco-White’s painting practice is characterised by a sense of ongoing entanglement: bringing a distillation of conceptual research (from disciplines including ecology, feminism, and the field of human relations) into play with a material process that includes methods such as natural dying, staining, assembling, drawing, painting, collage and sewing. Pasco-White’s processes draw on materials that have flowed in and out of use and disuse such as recycled paintings, clothes, sheets, grasses, leaves, fruits, spices, and food scraps as well as more traditional paint mediums. Through these varied approaches to painting and their installation, Pasco-White explores human-nature 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 exploring an ongoing cycle of decay and renewal.

Jahnne Pasco-White was the winner of the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize in 2019, and a finalist in the 2019 Ramsay Art Prize. She was the recipient of a 2018 Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Moya Dyring Memorial Studio scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and was awarded a Martin Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Painting 2018-20. Pasco-White has completed residencies in Germany, Italy, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, including at LIA in Leipzig, the Rome Art Program, the Icelandic Nes Artist Residency, and Gertrude Contemporary (2018-20). In 2022 Pasco-White completed a Master of Fine Art on a Research Training Program scholarship at Monash University titled An Embodied, Watery Methodology of Painting where she was a student representative on the Climate Task Force. The artist has been included in group exhibitions recently at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, Buxton Contemporary, Bendigo Art Gallery, La Trobe Art Institute, Sydney College of the Arts, The Finch Project London, The Australian Tapestry Workshop, Drill Hall Gallery, BEYOND at Melbourne Art Fair and the Art Gallery of South Australia. She has been the recipient of multiple grants including Australia Council for the Arts, Art Victoria, Creative Victoria, Regional Arts Victoria, NAVA, RMIT University. In 2020 the monograph Jahnne Pasco-White: Kin was published jointly by Art Ink and Unlikely, which includes a dozen essayists who interrogate the limits and possibilities of kinship, including Helen Johnson, Redi Koobak, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Tara McDowell, Stefanie Fishel and Jan Bryant, among others. Jahnne is a current Artspace studio resident 2025-26.

Image: Embodied Watery Entanglements, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, 2022. Photo: Andrew Curtis.

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.