Chelsea Lehmann: Statement

Chelsea Lehmann’s practice explores the body as a mutable physical and social form. Working primarily in oil, she uses shifts in viscosity, erasure and layered accumulation to allow figures and images to emerge, fracture and dissolve. Drawing on historical painting, her work revisits familiar gestures and pictorial conventions, unsettling their original meanings and opening them to contemporary concerns. The physical surface of paint becomes a way of exploring what images reveal, conceal or carry with them. Increasingly, her work considers the relationship between the body, landscape and cultural memory through ideas of para-history and the para-pastoral.