Chloë Roach is a 37-year-old artist from Hull who now lives and works in Hastings. Her art embraces the unsettling and uncanny aspects of life – interrogating uncomfortable ideas, awkward moments and worries, making repressed personal thoughts visible. Often the work explores her relationship with nature, societal roles as a woman, personal fetishes and obsessions, and absence of motherhood. The work, which frequently takes the form of painting or drawing, captures an imagined moment of awkwardly delivered performance, where the subjects are trapped in the paradox of self-consciousness and deliberate exposure. Despite the absurdity of the subjects’ actions, they feign confidence in the face of an audience and accept their judgement. The themes of shame and defiance are central to the works, as well as a determination to understand the thoughts we both fixate on and attempt to conceal. The artist sometimes likens her work to the mindset of a flasher – desperate for attention, even if it’s at the cost of self-respect and discomfort to the onlooker. The works are created using a combination of reference photos staged by the artist, Google images, old family photo albums and internet profile photos, ‘collaged’ together to form a coherent narrative.