Chelsea Jewell lives and works on the unceded land of the Yugumbeh Language Nation (Gold Coast) and is a graduate of the Byron School of Art’s three-year Contemporary Visual Art Program (2020-2022). In her emerging art practice, Chelsea leverages her background as an architect and designer, to expand on a spatial and structural literacy, exploring a rich affinity with line as object, surface, descriptor, and spectacle.
Using a pared back vocabulary of line, light and shadow, topographic surfaces and volumetric maps emerge as modular forms. Using ready-to-hand materials, the fabrication of sculptural works is expressed as a ritualised act, a repetitive meditation that exists as a feat when realised at scale.
The delicate quality of the three-dimensional drawings is often placed in tension with mass and density. Gesture is welcomed into the practice through accumulated errors that waver and shift through the work. These constructions aim to bring form to what is unseen, documenting relationships between body, time and place, relational works that have embedded narratives.
Chelsea has shown work regularly over the past three years on the Gold Coast and in Northern New South Wales. Since graduating from BSA she has been involved in numerous local arts events, performances and invitational workshops. Currently Chelsea is under the mentorship of Lincoln Austin (represented by Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane) and is collaborating with Geraldine Balcazar (performance artist & choreographer, Tweed Shire) on performative modes of practice for temporal multidisciplinary art works in the public realm.
Photograph by Ellamay Fitzgerald