BIO

b. Mornington

(Boonwurrung), Australia

Lives & works in Melbourne (Naarm)

With a diverse art practice that includes drawing, painting, installation and charcoal animation, Jo Michelle Piper creates landscape-based figurative work shaped by material transformation, time, erosion, weather and traces of erasure. Her practice examines the psychological and physical borders humans construct around themselves, between one another and against the landscape. Through working with elements that defy all borders, such as air and light, her art practice portrays the expansive potential we have in recognizing that all borders are inherently porous.

The current series, titled “States of Being”, considers death as the inevitable and final border we will encounter in life. Through images of imagined altered states and fleeting moments of the boundary between life and death, she envisages death as a transition rather than a fixed conclusion.

Through repeated acts of drawing, painting, erasure, burial and retrieval, forms surface and then recede. Submerged traces of the image eventually come to rest within layers of translucent paint.She then draws over the painted surface with charcoal, chalk, graphite and pastel, to create a final, temporary veil of concealment. Left unfixed, the ephemeral nature of these materials respond to air, weather and touch, gradually revealing the painted layers beneath. The work remains in a state of flux until the last particle of drawing dust drifts away from the surface.

In 2018 Jo Michelle received a Masters of Fine Art at Transart Institute of Creative Research, University of Plymouth, after attending Parsons Schools of Art & Design, Paris and Enmore Design Centre, Sydney.

Jo Michelle has exhibited internationally at Flutgraben e.V., Berlin; Storico Città, Lecce, Italy; Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello, Venice; Carriageworks, Sydney; and Mains d’Oeuvres, Paris. And participated in the Heysen Prize for Landscape, Hahndorf; 10More Girls, Sydney; Rooms Room Design Fair, Tokyo; Joya: arte + ecología AIR, Andalusia, Spain; and the Ufer Studio Summer Residency, Berlin.