Chloe Summerhayes

Chloe Summerhayes is an artist born and based in Ōtautahi. In 2022 she completed an MFA at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury.

Utilising drawing and painting methods, Summerhayes explores mutable ideas of temporality and bodily consciousness. Her work often references the romantic and phantasmal history of painting whilst contending with the anxieties of the contemporary world. Allowing corporeal limitations such as failure and intuition to lead the way, she draws attention to imperfections and the beauty in chaos.

Evident within Chloe Summerhayes' work is an obsessive inclination to revise and reshape until paintings are almost entirely constructed of incidental passages of abstraction. Formed-up figures and spaces are disassembled and disrupted, expressions of traditional skill broken with slices of intuitive brushwork and erasures.

Summerhayes’ practice reflects the complex nature of mortal existence by finding and straddling the ‘in between’ spaces regarding dualities such as reduction/addition, minimalism/excess and abstraction/figuration.