Jo Chate
Between Clarity
and
Collapse
I am interested in emptied out twilight spaces—spaces where action or a scene has just taken place or is about to happen. All the anticipation of a movie. They are spaces that are some place and no place. Familiar yet foreign. Light causes disorientation. These familiar places slip into the unlocatable.
![Jo Chate, Sea[e]scape](https://zarastro.art/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Jo-Chate_Sea-Escape_square.webp)
Jo Chate invites us into a space where the seen gives way to the sensed, uncovering moments of uncertainty and revelation.
Between Clarity and Collapse brings together a collection of Chate’s complex paintings to illuminate the slippery contours of the unknown. The selected works offer a meditation on the ambiguity beneath familiar forms and places we inhabit. Rather than presenting resolved spaces, each composition invites us to dwell within the shifting, indeterminate, and unresolved within us all.
Grounding the work in the recognizable textures of everyday life, such as bodily forms, shopfronts, and nearly-forgotten buildings, the familiar appears fractured. Through layered surfaces and architectural motifs, viewers find themselves at sites of collapse where the built world falters. Viewers are left navigating a physical terrain that is now governed by the fallible nature of memory, perception, and emotion.
As spatial certainty gives way, Chate’s spaces loosen from the rigidity of reality. Shadows drift where walls should be. Mannequins, instigating questions of gender or agency, hover like spectral figures. These apparitions awaken us to the captivating facets of the surreal seeping in through distortion. Echoing the suspended logic of dreams, meaning is now felt more than understood through the translucency within the artist’s environments.
The mannequins as seen in shop windows — they get transformed. They become human, but not human. I am thinking about AI in a slightly futuristic world. They are in the same space but not interacting as people, which feels a little unsettling. I have used the reflection in the window, blurring the boundaries between inside space and the outside.
Within the interplay of the real and the unreal, the artist constructs sites of fragmentation that reflect the instability of concepts such as identity, shelter, and time. Through this balance, Chate proposes living with the unknown as a vital condition. This is not a flaw in perception but a space for transformation and possibility.
Chate’s online exhibition compels us to embrace this newfound dislocation of certainty. Rather than seek resolution, the viewer is called to linger in these unsettled states. Chate’s work reminds us that it is within uncertainty, between clarity and collapse, that new ways of seeing, sensing, and being take form.
About the Artist
Jo Chate is a London-based painter whose practice merges feminist theory with environmental and spatial critique. She explores how built environments—shaped by patriarchal systems—influence how we move, see, and are seen, particularly in a female body.
Her process-led approach—combining physicality, reflection, and social commentary—yields paintings that are both personal and politically charged. The result is a practice that resists simple readings, drawing viewers into emotionally resonant spaces engaged with questions of embodiment.
Chate holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University. Her work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally, across both solo and group exhibitions.
Artworks
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Jo Chate Behind the Line (2023)
Oil on canvas(h) 150 x (w) 200 cm
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Jo Chate Coco Pure (2022)
Oil on print and frame(h) 47 x (w) 66 cm
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Jo Chate Danaidi (2024)
Oil on linen(h) 51 x (w) 61 cm
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Jo Chate Limbo (2024)
Oil on linen(h) 46 x (w) 41 cm
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Jo Chate Lost in Mind (2024)
Oil on linen(h) 170 x (w) 140 cm
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Jo Chate Metano (2024)
Oil on canvas(h) 150 x (w) 200 cm
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Jo Chate PressRewind Don’tPressRewind (2024)
Oil on linen(h) 70 x (w) 100 cm
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Jo Chate Sea[e]scape (2022)
Oil on print and frame(h) 51 x (w) 72 cm
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Jo Chate Untitled / Pistacchio (2023)
Oil on linen(h) 120 x (w) 110 cm
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Jo Chate Walk the Line (2023)
Oil on linen(h) 120 x (w) 110 cm
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Jo Chate Warrior (2019)
Oil on linen(h) 200 x (w) 130 cm
![<span class="art_header_1">Jo Chate</span> <span class="art_header_2" style="height:70px">Sea[e]scape (2022)</span><br /> <span class="art_header_3" style="height:65px">Oil on print and frame<p style=”margin-top: 20px”> (h) 51 x (w) 72 cm](https://zarastro.art/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Jo-Chate_Sea-Escape_square-300x300.webp)
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