Bio
Careful selector of words and harbourer of objects, Jo's guiding compass is reciprocity with material and language. They are an interdisciplinary artist working with text, printmaking, objects and place-specificity. Jo's practice is to be still, to gather, to dwell and to hold onto the remnants of un/a-gendered mothering performed by and between myself and inanimate beings. Their being is only concerned with stewing, not digesting, just gestating, living precariously anchored to a porous surface. Jo practices care that is maintenance, nourishment and obligation.
STATEMENT (artist/maker)
Jo’s practice explores the engagement of art as an exercise of care, centering the viewer as a participant in an intimate manner. The meditative process of caring for the inanimate heals the artist’s trauma, acting as a means to deconstruct otherness and identity. Guided by stillness, hope and radical responsibility, Jo embodies the role of steward for both materials and viewers. Jo’s practice unpacks identity in relation to interconnectivity between the self, others, nature and the inanimate. Organization of space and handmade books are used to engage the viewer, creating a space of solitude and reflection, in interactive installations. Jo’s interdisciplinary practice is grounded in language, sculpting poetry that explores knowing as a continuous process.
Jo explores fluctuation, degradation and regeneration, using the work as a means to preserve what cannot be preserved in a subtle and anti/intimate-spectacle manner. Engaging with the passage of time, imagery of transitional objects become referents of time, and speak about the cyclical process of knowing and perception. Baby blankets, driftwood and aloe plants are repeatedly used throughout Jo’s practice as objects that visually depict the effects of touch, by wind, water and the hand. The work calls the viewer to be a participant and hold the items included in the interactive installations. Engaging the hand is meant to enact an obligation or responsibility to the object being held. This act questions the hand's role in care and various relationships of reciprocal care that include the non-human. Additionally, caring for the weathered items requiring time to exist is a means to care for time. The installations present a space for activated viewership to work toward fusing one’s identity to others and the inanimate as a tangible step in non-binary thinking and a non-heirarchal organization of our society and environment.
Language is used as a tool to disrupt the ways in which words are consumed as a means to create a space to pause. There is ambiguity in the text to allow for the viewers to insert themselves into the narrative. The careful selection of words aims to be a proponent of breaking down the kyriarchal structure of language and manipulating time as an anti-capitalist endeavour. Achieved through unconventional patterning of language (fragmentation, repetition), texture as text, words with multiple definitions and disrupting conventional the pace and order of reading. The poetry Jo writes confronts the obsolescence of that which is weathered, presenting care for the cast away as an avenue for readers to reimagine and re-establish the way they interact with themselves, the inanimate, the environment and others.