Joanna Sellick

About

Painter working in oils and mixed media.

Statement

Joanna is a painter whose work explores motherhood, midlife, memory, and the shifting meaning of home. Her paintings draw on her relationships with herself, her family and the world around her, reflecting on how our sense of place, purpose and identity changes over time. Originally from London and now based in Wiltshire, Joanna studied Textile Design at Central Saint Martins. After working across a range of industries, she became a mother to two daughters. Motherhood reignited her desire to create, leading her to begin painting. Her process begins with smaller works that act as a space for experimentation; building momentum and generating ideas through making. Working with pencil, acrylic, watercolour and ink encourages immediacy and a direct, responsive approach to mark-making. More recently, she has incorporated collage, constructing images in ways that reconnects with her background in textiles and weaving. These smaller works feed into her large-scale oil paintings, which develop slowly through layers of fluid paint and expressive marks. Images emerge, dissolve and reappear as the paintings evolve, with intuition playing as important a role as intention. Her work has developed through periods of significant change: becoming a mother, leaving London and moving through midlife. Each experience has shifted her relationship to place, purpose and selfhood, bringing a sense of dislocation and prompting questions about where, and how, we belong. At the heart of her practice is the idea of homing: both a search and a remembering, a movement towards something familiar that may no longer exist in the same form. For Joanna, home is not simply a place we return to, but something we carry, rediscover and continually make within ourselves.

Education

• 1995BA Textile Design, Central St Martins College of Art, London

Exhibitions