Jahnne Pasco-White, Australia, born 1987, Being Here is Everything (What a Pity), 2018, Preston, Victoria, hand-dyed cottons and linens, cement oxide, synthetic polymer paint, oil,
crayon, pencil, various re-cycled fabrics, rice starch, PVA and Clag on plasterboard (five panels), 240.0 x 600.0 cm (overall); Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer
Gallery.
Jahnne Pasco-White
Being Here is Everything (What a Pity) was originally painted in situ onto the walls at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, in November 2018. Now Jahnne Pasco-White has removed her painting and reconfigured the original work as a five-piece panel. In Being Here is Everything (What a Pity), she responds to her own experience of pregnancy, birthing and mothering, bringing this into dialogue with the experience of modernist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. At age 31, Modersohn-Becker died from an embolism just nineteen days after giving birth to her daughter. Her final words were "What a pity".
Pasco-White’s painting practice is informed by her interest in the layers of authorship that are both evidenced and concealed by the artist’s mark-making and the continual processes of decay and renewal.