For our final solo presentation of 2026, Saint Cloche is delighted to unveil Everything Said at Once, a new body of work by Melbourne-based artist Christopher Jewitt, bringing together paintings, ceramics and sculptural mirrors in an exuberant exploration of colour, gesture and visual language.
For Jewitt, feeling exists before language. Joy, desire, longing and uncertainty arrive simultaneously, resisting the order and limitations of words. His practice embraces this immediacy, developing a distinctive vocabulary of spirals, zigzags, stars and spontaneous gestures that oscillate between abstraction, figuration and the familiar markings of childhood.
In his paintings, softly airbrushed signs emerge beneath restless layers of oil paint, where saturated colour, scribbled lines and shifting forms collide. These compositions possess an irreverent energy, balancing apparent disorder with an instinctive sense of structure and rhythm.
Jewitt’s successful debut with Saint Cloche at Sydney Contemporary in 2025 marked a significant development in his practice, as his distinctive painted language extended beyond the surface of the canvas into three-dimensional form for the first time. What began as spontaneous gestures and recurring symbols acquired a new physical presence, establishing a dialogue between painting and sculpture that continues to evolve.
In Everything Said at Once, Jewitt extends this sculptural language into a series of towering, celebratory ceramic vessels, where the immediacy of his painted gestures assumes an architectural presence. Rising to approximately one metre, these hand-built column urns translate recurring signs into sculptural relief, their monochromatic surfaces heightening the tension between ornament, structure and form. Elsewhere, modular ceramic assemblages explore the precarious equilibrium of individual elements, bringing together contrasting volumes and saturated glazes in compositions that challenge conventional notions of balance and beauty. Terracotta-framed mirrors further complicate the relationship between image, object and viewer, drawing the surrounding space into Jewitt’s evolving visual language.
Moving fluidly between painting and sculpture, Jewitt challenges the distinction between image and object. His visual language is neither intended to be read nor translated. Instead, it operates through an immediate encounter with colour, form and feeling, where excess, humour and contradiction coexist.
The exhibition follows Jewitt’s consecutive selections as a finalist in the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in 2025 and 2026, reflecting the growing recognition of his technically ambitious and experimental practice.
