Claudia Jowitt

Claudia Jowitt is an artist who moves between the two and three-dimensional, allowing sculptural force, and the three-dimensional, to pull on her two-dimensional painted surfaces. There is also an interaction in her conceptual concerns with an ongoing investigation of the feminine in art and the insertion of place into abstraction.


In Jowitt’s work, place is the moana, the ocean which binds the Pacific, and Jowitt's Pakeha and Fijian heritage. Her mix of Pasifika and European abstraction is distinctive, pertinent and personal - operating to push the borders of European traditions away from eurocentrism.

In addition, there is a challenge to mid-century, modern, masculine notions of pure painting with all its disdain for the decorative, Jowitt's paintings are a feminine and feminist reclaiming of luscious surface. Notions of purity are also subverted with the inclusion of found elements, which speak to location and identity. Reflecting her partial Fijian heritage, several of the works incorporate masi (Fijian tapa cloth), magimagi (coconut husk cord) and shell as well as plant, stone and leather.

These richly textured and layered paintings in pearlescent pastels seem to test the limits of what paint can do. Here all sorts of tools and kitchen implements - from icing bags and decorator tips to tile grouting combs - are employed to squeeze, mould and push oil and acrylic paint into distinctive surfaces that are almost sculptural reliefs.

Claudia Jowitt completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 2015. She has also studied at Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2016, she was the inaugural Tautai Pacific Arts Trust Artist in Residence at the Dunedin School of Art. She has been exhibiting since completing her undergraduate degree at AUT in 2009 and was included in an exhibition of four Pacific women artists at Enjoy in Wellington. She has work in the University of Auckland and Wallace Collections as well as in many private collections.