Nancy Chew

Vancouver, Canada

Biography

Jacqueline Metz and Nancy Chew are visual artists who started working collaboratively in 1997. Their backgrounds are varied and interesting: Nancy’s is drawing, painting, print-making, curating and teaching; Jacqueline’s is photography, archaeology and literature. They met through their common interests in design, architecture, landscape and cultural thought. These disciplines, crafts, processes conflate to create an art practice that is conceptual and abstract yet uniquely grounded in place. Their practice explores ideas of place and perception, landscape and culture. Their body of work is informed by an interest in space – built space, implied space, movement through space; by perception, the filters of personal and cultural memory and experience; by literature; and by the collaborative process. Underlying all their work is a fascination with landscape, especially the human imprint, the cultural landscape: they have a deep interest in how culture interprets and alters the land and how the land frames our experience of culture.