Led by a curiosity about who the world is designed and built for, Chloe Beddow creates paintings made from embodied materials such as wood, metal and concrete that exist between painting and sculpture. Beddows work reimagines painting as a functional, spatial and sculptural form to critically explore our relationship to space, particularly in relation to accessibility, visibility and the female body.
Our visual awareness is conditioned by what we experience, informing what we notice
and rendering certain people or objects invisible. Beddows work interrogates these social behaviours and norms embedded in how we navigate and perceive space. Beddows work offers a compelling absence; her subtly constructed, meticulously machined surfaces invite close inspection, drawing the viewer into an almost microscopic engagement with texture, form and depth. Beddows work originates from the ideology of painting, moving fluidly across material terrains. Her practice hinges on this layered, constructive logic - past and present are combined into new visual forms that question the language of material and how we frame what we see. Throughout, there is a palpable underlying tension between surface and image. In exploring both the associative qualities of images and materials, Beddow allows them to speak to somewhat juxtaposed temporalities and places.