Gina Southgate
Gina Southgate is primarily a live painter, best known on the international jazz scene where she produces spectacular, qualitative, real time paintings. For over three decades she’s painted at gigs and festivals capturing the vitality and nuance in her unique portraits of world class musicians. She also performs creating real time audio/visual interactive artworks with improvising musicians.
Coming up through the world of freely improvised music and spontaneous site specific performance happenings on the avant garde fringe in the 90’s Southgate was encouraged by the inclusivity of that scene to perform herself.
In this role she creates and manipulates site specific artworks with paint, props and objects. These are chosen for their absurdist qualities as well as for their visual and sculptural potential and their sonic abilities. She explores in performance the futility and irony of domesticity and labour. Southgate’s degree training in metalwork and its necessary longwinded skills served as a springboard and a catalyst to a world where art is made in and of the moment, fuelled by and aligned with the musicians she interacts with.
She currently performs in duos with Maggie Nicols and Charles Hayward and had a longstanding duo with the late John Russell
She has collaborated with, been resident artist for and exhibited at (among others); Riverside Studios, Unpredictable, Lume, EFG London Jazz Festival, Gateshead International Jazz festival, All Tomorrows Parties, Jazz Leeds, Jazz North East, Birmingham Jazz, Cambridge Jazz Festival, We Out Here festival, Jazz in the Round, Jazz on 3, Vortex Jazz, UK. Jazzahead!, Konfrontationen, and Kaleidophon Festivals, Europe. Vision Festival, USA.
‘Over many years, British painter Gina Southgate has built a reputation as a daring and witty proponent of spontaneous action painting, working specifically in the milieu of free jazz and improvisation, creating live visual accompaniment and documentation of countless gigs in London and beyond, providing a striking and always entertaining visual counterpoint to the music on stage’ Dan Spicer - Journalist
