Jo Kitchen - April 2026
Jo Kitchen (b. 1996) is a London-based painter who graduated from Central Saint Martins. Her work explores memory, personal experience, and the act of looking back, often translating everyday moments into abstracted compositions shaped by colour, collage, and intuition. She stayed at House of Hulda in April 2026.
Kitchen’s practice is rooted in what she describes as a kind of “hyper-romanticising” of lived experience - taking small, often overlooked details and reworking them through memory. Her paintings tend to sit between autobiography and fiction, where forms are simplified, altered, or reassembled to reflect how moments are felt rather than how they originally appeared.
During her ten-day residency, she established a steady rhythm of working, drawing throughout the day and painting into the evenings. “I spent a lot of my time exploring and drawing throughout the day, then painting in the late afternoon and into the evening.” This structure allowed her to move fluidly between observation and reinterpretation, a key part of her process.
What shifted most was her relationship to time. Without pressure or deadlines, she allowed paintings to develop more slowly, resisting the urge to resolve them too quickly. “I allowed paintings the time to sit and breathe, rather than rushing toward a finished result.” This slower pace aligned closely with her interest in memory, where meaning builds gradually rather than immediately.
The residency also sharpened her attention to colour and light. Subtle changes in the landscape revealed new tonal relationships, encouraging a more patient and immersive way of seeing.
“It altered the way I see what I paint, encouraging me to slow down, sit with my subjects, and experience them more fully.”
“Being in an environment that allowed for true stillness made me realise just how necessary that was.”
Since her stay at House of Hulda, Kitchen continues to develop her painting practice, carrying forward a more open and intuitive approach - where memory, time, and process remain central to the work.
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