Armando Chant

Armando Chant’s inter-disciplinary practice is founded in the act of drawing, and mark-making using analogue and digital media, and the inter-relationships between gesture, surface and space. The drawn image produced through gestural acts is used as an interpretive tool to create further iterations, thereby re-framing it within an ephemeral and transient context across surface, site and screen. His works translate the specific into the ambiguous through processes of erasure and negation, building on the tension and connection between craft and concept, image and object, and local and global in a constant oscillatory state of transformation.

The artist’s media and techniques traverse the technological and the hand-crafted, including vintage stereoscope glass negatives depicting landscape scenes, digital photographic printing, mineral pigments, wax and varnish with graphite and cross-cultural exchange with master embroidery artisans in India. These processes continually change the nature of the ”surface” through multi-layered marking and staining, resulting in hybrid and ambiguous imagery that sits in between photographic image and materialised surface. These materialising processes instigate a perceptual change by creating a materialised atmospheric veil between work and viewer through multi-layered scarring and staining. We witness the spectacle of a ‘spectral’ image as it sheds its geographical specificity through material intervention, placing the viewer into a form of imaginative correspondence and engagement.

Born in Seville, Spain, and raised in London, Armando has participated in significant group and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Within Australia, he has participated in exhibitions across Sydney and Melbourne, including major regional exhibitions such as the Tamworth Textile Triennial 2020 and 2015, where his work was acquired by the gallery. Armando was also a finalist in the Wangaratta 2019 Contemporary Textile Award Biennial. Internationally, Armando has participated in curating solo exhibitions, installations, and symposiums in Florence, Finland and Paris. In 2018, he was Artist in Residence at the DRAWInternational in Caylus, France: the leading program for artists whose central focus of exploration is drawing in its varied forms. Armando was also invited to exhibit at the Basilica de Santa Croce, Florence in 2015 and in Finland as part of the ‘Arts Of Research’ conference in Helsinki in 2017.

Along with his MA in Fine Arts from NAS, Armando also holds an MA in Constructed Textiles from Royal College, London, and a BA (Hons) in Fashion and Textile Design from the University of Brighton, UK. Additionally, Armando’s academic teaching career has included teaching posts at the University of Technology (UTS), Sydney, London College of Fashion, Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, UK, and Kingston University, UK. He has also acted as an academic consultant, and taught specialised modules to students and staff at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, as well as being an external examiner for their integrated design degree.

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