Exhibition open 11th October – 3rd November.
Fri-Sun 10:30am-4:30pm
Jo’s work is primarily about finding narratives implicit in inanimate objects and spaces. She is driven by an attempt to ‘rescue’ the ephemeral elements of a human’s reality – rejected or disposable objects, family stories, songs, images recorded during hospital visits, pieces of typography, bits of tut, traces of patterns and discarded textiles – by integrating them into my practice. Ephemera, for her, represent the impermanent elements in life that mark the passage of time and are likely to be forgotten unless assimilated and reanimated in a longer-lasting narrative that can feed into a collective remembering, or an individual’s connection with a past moment. This memorialising of objects from the past which re-positions these ‘rememberings’ in the present, feels like the keystone to the structure of her creativity.
This current show of work is about Millicent Bystander’s “Diary of a Nobody” which has been kept for several years. She has attempted to compassionately reproduce screen prints of her mercurial entries as, for her, diaries are all about the object, truth/untruth, remembering and memorialising all within a passage of time. Jo’s affection for her musings will become a lifetime’s illustrated body of work that she will endeavour to tenderly recreate for as long as she can. She has recorded just how a ‘nobody’ goes about the business of living where nothing particularly special happens. So, if you strongly desire to see just how fallible, whimsical, candid and occasionally bleak Millicent is in all manner of life’s minutiae then this is definitely a show for you.
