Jo Bruton

Biography

Jo Bruton is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. She has taught in many other colleges as visiting lecturer including the Slade School of Art, The Royal College, and Royal Academy of Arts. Her research explores the feminine within abstract painting, which also locates itself within the broader debates around material practice and feminist critique. The decorative provides a context for navigating subjectivity and place, to unpack as well as inhabit the cultural paraphernalia that surrounds and constructs the female experience. Recent work explores a relationship between digital and painted surfaces, overlaying traces of pattern found in theatrical and domestic settings. Crafted detail and decorative borders are used to transform the everyday into a shifting territory for the made up and masquerading subject to occupy.

Bruton is a member of the Subjectivity and Feminisms research group at Chelsea, which has prompted other modes of production for her ideas, further adapting and testing the possibilities for her practice within a broader research environment. Her research has been supported by the AHRC and she recently won, ‘The Lorne Trust Scholarship Award’. She was The Stanley Picker Fellow, at Kingston University, London. And was Fellow in Painting at Winchester School of Art. She has undertaken international residencies in Hong Kong at HKBU and Raid Projects in Los Angeles. Her solo exhibitions include, ‘Run’ in 2018 and “Walk slowly towards the light” 2002, at Matt’s Gallery, London. Capitaine Can-Can in 2006 at Sadler’s Wells, London. And ‘Silhouette’ at the Panorama Gallery, Barcelona in 1998, and The Winchester Gallery in 1997. In 2005 she was commissioned by De La Warr pavilion, Bex-hill-on-Sea to make a site-specific painting installation for its inaugural exhibition ‘Variety’. She was commissioned to make permanent site-specific painting installations by Imperial Healthcare Trust, for Charing Cross Hospital in 2018 and by Hospital Rooms, for Springfield Hospital in 2022. Her work was shown alongside Rosa Lee, in ‘Haptic Visuality’ at the Richard Saltoun Gallery 2022 for which she was interviewed by Jillian Knipe for Studio International. Her work is included in Publications, Unframed, Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting edited by Rosemary Betteron. Quand le cabaret le plus celebre du monde inspires les artistes by Francesco Rapazzini., ‘About Painting’, with Essays by Helen Baker & Barry Schwabsky. ‘Warped’ Painting and the feminine, with text by Terry Myers. She collaborated with British writer and novelist Michèle Roberts to produce an artist book with text by Roberts entitled ‘Chorus’ which accompanies her painting Capitaine Can-Can. She has recently collaborated with the ‘Amber Room’ at Matt's Gallery in 2023. And with Subjectivity and Feminisms research group for the exhibition ‘Undoing, Redoing, Revolting: A Feminist Response to the Special Collections at Chelsea 2024

Jo Bruton is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London. Her work is held in public collections including, the Tate, British Council, University of Southampton, Kingston University and Government Art Collection.