My practice considers painting as a space of encounter between colour, surface, material and attention. Working across monochrome oil painting and glass on paper, I explore how a painting can hold presence without relying on image or narrative.
My oil paintings are completed in a single, continuous session and often develop in dialogue with my drawings. Their making begins well before paint is applied. Surfaces are stretched, sanded and repeatedly primed over several weeks. This preparation creates a responsive ground, allowing paint and surface to meet in a process shaped by concentration, hesitation, human error and material resistance.
Working with a single colour allows small shifts in tone, density, texture and light to become significant. Colour functions not as a subject, but as a means of sustaining attention and resisting easy interpretation.
My glass works extend these concerns through a different material language. Following an investigation into the possibility of a colourless painting, I use glass, paper, reflection and light to consider how colour and shape might operate as painting without paint. Coloured glass becomes a form of pigment, while transparency allows the work to change with its surroundings and the movement of the viewer.
Across both bodies of work, painting is understood less as a fixed image than as an experience of looking. The works remain quiet but active: surfaces that gradually reveal themselves, holding ambiguity, intimacy and the possibility of continual change.
My work is held in private collections in the UK, Switzerland, New Zealand and Australia.
Exhibitions:
2026 PAPERCUT, The Place Downstairs, London
2026 AUTO AMOR PROJECT, Auto Amor HQ, Sevenoaks
2026 AUTO AMOR PROJECT, Constantine Ltd, Heathrow, London
2026 AUTO AMOR PROJECT VOL.2, The Art House, London
2025 MA Graduate Show, City & Guilds of London Art School - Degree Show
2025 AUTO AMOR PROJECT, Auto Amor, Dunton Green
2025 MA Interim Show, City & Guilds of London Art School
2025 Your Work Here, The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, Kent
2024 Secret Postcard Show 2024, The Old Lock Up Gallery, Derbyshire Peak District
2024 Works on Paper, Rush Coffee Group, Tunbridge Wells, Kent
2023 Small Works Winter Show 2023, Spring Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
2023 Freelands Painting Prize 2023, Freelands Foundation Project Space, London
2023 Anxiety of Interdisciplinary 2.0, Cambridge University
2023 Graduate Showcase, Cambridge School of Art - Degree Show
2023 Midpoint, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
2022 Intensify, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge
2022 No Imagination, Unit 15, The Grafton, Cambridge
2021 re-emerge, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge
2021 Exposure, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge
Awards:
2024 Leverhulme Scholarship
2023 Dr Supanee Gazeley Fine Art Award 2023
2023 Freelands Painting Prize 2023
Education:
2024-2025 MA Fine Art, City and Guilds of London Art School
2020-2023 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University
Publications:
101 contemporary artists and more… Volume 10, Collect Art, 2025
Collect Art Summer Issue, Volume 70, June 2025
Freelands Painting Prize 2023, Freelands Foundation 2023
Socials and Contact:
Instagram: @chloeculley_
Email:studio@chloeculley.uk