Synthesising art conservation imaging practices with painting techniques, Chelsea Lehmann's work reveals the materiality and processes behind painting to enhance aesthetic and affective registers of tactility. 

'The Articulate Surface' centres on the retrospective activation of the painted surface using advanced imaging techniques such as X-ray and infrared, combined with physical erasure. By using these processes, Lehmann exposes latent information and brings together a range of actions that reverse or alter the conventional sequence of oil painting.

Lehmann uses a baroque sensibility embodied in a plaimpsest of painted layers, allowing earlier traces of her work to remain visible. Using dramatic lighting and painterly gestures, Lehmann emphasises the performativity and artifice of Baroque bodies, echoing the way Western art has traditionally grafted constructs of feminine identity onto the illusions of representation itself.

Lehmann's body of work, including paintings and light-based works, offer creative interventions which 'undo' these constructs by imagining the female form in conflict with painting's weighty history and stable surfaces.