An interdisciplinary artist from Yorkshire, based in Kent. My work takes on the subject of ‘support’, structural and bodily. My practice is informed by environmental memory and labour as art. Using traditional art and domestic materials, reflecting a womxn artist’s life, I fuse art with domestic labour. Disrespecting the hierarchy of materials and giving value to the unseen repetitive actions of domestic and maternal work, recognising its value and positioning it within art spaces.
Selected exhibitions:
2024
RA Summer Show
CANCAN, group show, ASC gallery Vauxhall
Blood Sweat and Fears, group show, Proposition Gallery, Chalk Farm
2023
Art Show, the Tabernacle, group show, Portobello,
Fell down a well, group show, ESOP Studios
2022
Stars Under My Armpits, group show The ESOP Wood Green London
Mythical Political, The Fire Station Creative, Dunfermline, Scotland
2021
Art Matters, The ESOP, The Art Pavilion, Mile End, London
SPLINT! group show, David Mach RA studio, Havelock Walk, Forest Hill, London
“Abstraction in chaos, being pulled back down to earth, aspirations to fly are freighted with burdens, like a crushed paper aeroplane sinking into a puddle. Jo Martins beautifully formal constructions are not so much a rag and bone shop of the soul as constructivism reinvented by a cowboy builder. Painting has endless possibilities but sometimes it is necessary to restrict oneself in order to achieve one’s vision, as is the case with Jo Martin, whose ambitious assemblages are created out of somewhat forlorn, but nevertheless evocative materials. She has restricted her palette to black and white, ochres and the natural colours of sacking and other found materials. From these humble means she constructs vast assemblages which blur the boundaries of sculpture and painting, drawing and installation.”
— Hughie O’Donoghue RA
“Painting is a language structure, but it is also “das Ding”, the unknowable Thing, it is also gendered, though like in life it seems that gender is transferable and fluid. Qualities are also symptoms; as mind becomes embedded in matter and composition, symptoms are transferred into the body of the painting rather than the actual body. The six women who pioneered the inaugural year of ESOP EADY have all brought their own experiences and are excavating their own multi-layered histories. The artists reflect a current urgency of the female voice in contemporary painting, in defiance of the masculine perspective as ubiquitous and historically determined...”
— Dan Coombs, Head of Programme ESOP Advanced Painting and The Artist Development Course. On the EADY ESOP Course Group Show at the Handbag Factory, 2024. The course overseen by Hughie O’Donoghue RA and Dan Coombs.