About
“There are two Jodys. Known and unknown. Word and sound. Shape and process. Id and ego. Both these Jodys weave in and out of each other, shaping, caressing, finessing a formal and epistemological pluralism that delights and penetrates both in juxtaposition and contradistinction. Jody speaks, sculpts, installs, performs and paints. And the commonality that runs through all these diverse pursuits is her intention to capture, isolate and amplify that very diversity, and all the paradoxes that come with being a spoken word artist who paints or a sculptor who performs. Connections abound across the widest possible plains and planes of creativity in the inventive art of Jody DeSchutter.
I like the feel of her sculpture; the rhythm and metre of her intonation; the gravity of her performance; the fleshiness of her painting.
SCULPTURE
INTONATION
PERFORMANCE
FLESHINESS
FEEL
GRAVITY
PAINTING
RHYTHM
Each adjective works with each discipline. Each practice ignites the same mood and feelings in her viewer or audience. A brushstroke becomes a spoken word; a wooden veneer becomes a stoic performance. Everything sort of dovetails together so neatly, so effortlessly in Jody’s practice. Round balls fit square holes. And all she needs to do is push gently. With her brush.
You can see all of this consanguinity in a simple little painting. Performing ways of becoming (2019) sees a Jacob’s Ladder of hands extend up Jody’s canvas, set against a chiselled background of scratched blacks and hatched greys. Hands, like eyes, never lie. They have personalities of their own. Jody’s hands meditate, bless, snap and implore all at once, dancing in and out of passion, compassion, impression and expression. It is a delightful, beautifully executed painting of a notoriously difficult subject to paint, but it sings not because it has been deftly done. It sings because it is a solo performance in a much grander score of imagination and achievement.
Painting as performance as sculpture as poem as painting as … You spin me right round, baby, right round … round the mulberry bush.”
-An excerpt from an essay by Matthew Carey Williams on Cease Producing Stimuli
Photo by Matt Favero @liminalwarp
Statement
DeSchutter embraces diverse media which loop back on and into each other. Surface, form, and sound celebrate a lack of singular origin, they embrace paradox and uncertainty. She is interested in how the endless feedback loops comprised of observation, perception, experience, and environment shape our personal and collective reality.
Using cues and scaffolding indebted to established modalities or traditions, DeSchutter twists, grasps, and signals towards otherness, the not-yet-known, and the unknowable; leading the viewer down unarticulated corridors of mutating ideas.
DeSchutter taught herself traditional portraiture in oil, wood carving, and sewing while housed in an arts education heavily directed towards the conceptual. This was a simple reaction but it pushed together two seemingly disparate categories or modes of expression. Her practice is a continuous question of their intersections.
This leads to an interest in other modes of understanding or ways of making the invisible visible, such as a Feynman diagram or a spiritual ceremony. There is something infinitely provocative about the overlapping and recessing spaces between them. Especially as these perforated expanses seem to become more buried and alienated in the outside world in favour of clear sections or sides.
Perhaps revelation dissolves or changes the moment it is delineated or perhaps delineation is the only way we can come to knowing it.
Born in Lake Country BC Canada, she received a Bachelor’s in Visual Arts in Victoria BC. DeSchutter now lives and works in London UK. Her work spans spoken word, painting, sculpture, and tattoo.