Chloe Yates

Chloe Yates is a mixed media fine artist and illustrator, working predominantly in acrylic paints and resin. As an artist, she is interested in the power of the cute and its various juxtapositions, in order to trigger and manipulate strong and uncomfortable emotional responses. Creating sickly sweet, candy coloured nightmares, exploring the psychological effects of cuteness and its controlling influence on human emotions and modern society, as well as both Western and Japanese pop culture.

Contemporary life is saturated with cuteness, from our obsession with social media photo filters, texts filled with emojis and the immense popularity of cute cartoon characters such as Hello Kitty and Pokémon. ‘This is Cute’ is a body of work which uses its sickly cute and grotesquely kitschy aesthetic to delve into and contrast darker subjects such as violence, death, decay and the unsettling power of cute to control and intensify human reaction. We associate cute things with a feeling of being safe, and nostalgic, for this reason, it heightens the viewers emotional response to contrasting darker themes.