Works by Justine Cal

Solo exhibition of outsider artist Justine Cal.

Since her first exhibition in 1994 Cal has exhibited in numerous cultural centres and galleries in Paris where she lived and worked for fifteen years.

Cal began to produce works of art at a time in her life when she was suffering from depression and precarious housing, the action of expression through painting provided a new direction and form of interaction with the world around her.

She has since developed a body of work both figurative and abstract which identifies many different aspects of her own life, her daily encounters and her own political voice.

She makes work that explores very diverse aspects of living; many of her paintings represent a personal response to what concerns her as a woman and a humanitarian. She has often used found materials such as pieces of wood, discarded doors, large-scale canvases and currently photography. She has a striking use of colour, which prevails in huge ecstatic canvases of abstract expressionism and insightful social documentation.

"Painting is a way of documenting the world around me from humour to colour via the darker realities that lie beneath the surface." Justine Cal

Through Cal's work it becomes obvious to see that she holds issues of homelessness and mental health very close to her heart, she has worked on socially motivated projects with people experiencing homelessness and people with mental health problems. She has also been an active community based artist often working with children and adults from varied cultures.

Cal's development as an artist has taken her to extremely diverse arenas including the realm of street theatre where she performed as a clown and fire-eater. However, it was her three year association with Kenzo in the fabric-buying department where she gained true inspiration, here she gained from being exposed to archives of fabrics from all over the world which had been collected since the sixties. Kenzo also afforded her a wealth of research material on cultural and artistic trends that she has used as resource material within the design environment.

Justine Cal is exceedingly experimental in all aspects of contemporary art she has even had her work digitised into a virtual gallery space on CD-ROM. She is an artist who is comfortable and actively experiments in other mediums including, 3D realisation, collage, textiles, ceramics and photography.