Jo Ball

A solo show of new work at Studio Kind in Barnstaple, North Devon.

​https://www.studiokind.org.uk/many-leaves-turn-jo-ball

‘Many Leaves Turn’ presents new work by Jo Ball. The floor and wall-based pieces are informed by ideas of fragility and resilience, made from materials gathered from the artist’s allotment, home and the city she lives in. Everyday stuff such as string, paper, mud and sticks are used to create forms that refer to holding and containment and their opposites - letting go or overflowing.

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The process of making is key and hands are a recurrent motif. Slip cast in terracotta, the artists own hands are displayed on low platforms. Made of unfired terracotta they look as if they are wilting under pressure, they are deliberately taken out of the moulds early and so cannot hold their shape. The platforms are made from breeze block forms cast in a mixture of paper, mud and clay. Large hand-knotted nets fall loosely from the ceiling, changing colour as they descend gracefully to touch the floor. On the surrounding walls hang large pieces of linen dyed with buddleia. Considered by many people an invasive weed, this adaptable plant grows alongside roads, trains tracks and industrial estates, finding a way to thrive in the most unlikely of places.

Practising a kind of domestic foraging; the artist saves paper from the recycling to be shredded and turned into mud-blocks, prunings from the allotment that would otherwise go into the compost heap. In fact, the idea of composting is a useful way to think about her approach. Objects thought of as waste or surplus are kept and taken to the studio, where they sit alongside other things, sometimes for years. Though a slow unfolding something else emerges, something new and nourishing.

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Towards the tail-end of the pandemic, Jo was invited to take part in a book club to read ‘All we can Save’, a 2020 collection of essays and poetry highlighting a range of women's voices in the environmental movement. This experience led to a deeper thinking about how as an artist, she could speak towards the climate crisis and the emotional impact it has on us.

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“My making processes are often slow and repetitive. Peeling bark from willow branches in long ribbons revealing the moist apple green wood underneath, looping and knotting string countless times to form a net, collecting and shredding paper then soaking, blending it with clay and soil before finally casting it into blocks. These actions soothe my mind and provide an important counterpoint to the rush of everyday life. I offer the work to the audience with the intention of evoking wonder and curiosity, while also drawing subtle attention to feelings of overwhelm and anxiety. In truth I make art because it helps to keep me sane. Because it keeps alive a belief in the possibility of a different way of doing things.”

A Gathering of Unasked Possibility is an exhibition and series of events by artists, researchers, and advocates who interrogate issues of contemporary precarity. They have dedicated their practices to addressing a range of issues - climate, political, economic, social - with calls for progressive responses that engage with lucid, active hope as ballast. A Gathering creates a propositional space with breathing room for alternative ways of thinking, expressing, and being.

A Gathering of Unasked Possibility is a travelling exhibition and event programme launching in London in October 2024, arriving in Somerton, Somerset in Spring 2025 and Beacon, New York In Autumn 2025.

A Gathering next travels to:
ACEarts, Somerton, UK 8 March - 26 April 2025
AU Gallery, Beacon, NY Autumn 2025

Curated by Judith Rodgers, A Gathering crafts an interactive space and exhibition that invites what is possible without demand. Transporting us to an experience far from our daily existence and yet intimately connected to it.

Artists Jo Ball, Kelly M O’Brien, and Lydia Halcrow, draw out and explore themes around ecological uncertainty and relational entanglement. Their work leverages creative and hope-filled perspectives, offering both ballast and antidote to the precarity of current times.

The artists present new work spanning sculpture, wall-based art, installation, mixed media and print, navigating and holding complex ideas with care and curiosity.

An exhibition by Jo Ball. Jessie Blindell & Rebecca Burton.

Walcot Chapel , Bath. July 2023

The title of the exhibition came about when the artists were talking about potential overlaps between their practices. All three are interested in human relationships to place - to the earth beneath our feet. Their works could be situated within a subtle category of ‘landscape’, an approach of making art that began with prehistoric cave drawings and runs through to the present day. Working with earth pigments, capturing sensory experiences of the outdoors and creatures who live there, or examining the discord between our species and others.

Groundling refers to creatures that live on or near the earth; a fish at the bottom of the sea, a creeping plant running adventitious roots along the surface of the soil to find a foothold. ‘Groundling’ is also a 17th century term given to members of the theatre audience who stood in the pit below the stage - as ‘uncritical or unsophisticated spectators’.

In the current time of environmental crisis ‘why make art?’ feels like an urgent question. Perhaps some of us are groundlings, unrefined onlookers who have lost the capacity for connection with each other and our surroundings - the water, the air, the land. Perhaps art, both viewing and making, can do many things - foster community, provide spaces for reflection, wonder & awe - giving form to imaginings of a different kind of world.

After Winter, an exhibition in April 2023 at Hours Gallery, Bristol.

More information added soon!

All photos: Dan Weill

‘One thousand flowers’ is a project that involved planting 1000 wild flower bulbs on a planting day in October 2022. Sited within the former Mangotsfield train station on the outskirts of east Bristol the flowers will grow and bloom the following spring, and a singing event will take place in March 2023.

Commissioned by Suzanne Heath for Mangotsfield Folly.

An outdoor work at the Verge - an urban sculpture park in Glasgow. I was invited to make new work in response to the site - a small piece of land under a rail bridge, near to the river Clyde and the former docks area. The artist Mary Redmond set up the project and has brought it into use though gentle landscaping and planting.

Four large nets of organic cotton cordage dyed with indigo, madder, weld and coreopsis. The measurements of the gauge of the nets corresponds to each member of my family, and myself - mother, father, son and daughter.

A text by Sara Barker in response to the work is available to read here along with more images and information about the project.

Funded by Creative Scotland.,

2019.

Handmade book. Digital photographic images on Somerset satin paper. Japanese stab-binding linen with linen thread. 9x 15 x 3 cm.

A unique hand-made book of images taken at Money’s garden in Giverney whilst a horticultural volunteer there in October & November 2013. The book illustrates the journey from the order of the formal garden, through the many flower-lined paths to the wilder environment of the surrounding countryside. From day to dusk, controlled to wild.

The Ropewalkers commission culminated with a group show at OSR in October 2016. On display I had some bundles of West Coker flax with hand-cast pewter tokens, a series of eleven drawings taken from the a 19th Century tithe survey of West Coker parish, a hand-made net covered with local soil and an edition of 200 booklets documenting Patches of Blue Sky for the public to take away.

Many thanks to Simon Lee Dicker, Ross Aikten and all at the Twineworks, Matt Ayling and Ann Ball.

Patches of Blue Sky is a project to grow flax in West Coker Somerset. Part of the 2016 Ropewalkers Commissions by OSR Projects to create work in response to Dawes Twineworks.

The project aims to connect people and place by re-establishing a crop that was grown for hundreds of years in the local area. Flax was traditionally used for sailcloth and twine, forming the main industry of the West Coker and surrounding areas for centuries, but fell into decline from the 1950's. Dawes is believed to be the last remaining extant twineworks with all its machinery still present.

From February 2016 flax seed was available to anyone who wanted to take part and over 80 people grew the flax over the summer. Many people brought their harvested flax stooks to the twineworks at the harvest event in October.

There is a blog about project which continues to be updated as the flax is processed into twine over the coming months. Flax will be grown again at the twineworks in 2017 and I'll also be presenting the project (and giving out more seed) at Bridport Museums' Ropewalkers Fair next summer.
 

In March 2017 I took part in Transition 2017 at Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall. It was a really enjoyable and productive week with much work being made and many interesting chats with gallery visitors.

I spent a week in the lower gallery working on ideas for a new installation piece involving a video of a knotting lesson and a sculptural element made from string. The original idea was to film a macramé lesson offered to me by a wonderful lady in her nineties that I met during the flax project in West Coker. This didn't happen before the Transition project so instead I enlisted the help of Richard Hopkins, Secretary of the West Country Knotters. The video shows Richard teaching the technique of tying a bowline knot. The string lines hanging in a circle from the ceiling are a mix of white and ink-coloured pieces of polypropylene cord, only tied using bowlines. The viewer can walk into the knotted enclosure to watch the video and also walk around the whole piece.

I was interested in the idea of learning and teaching a skill, of the movement where a piece of knowledge passes from something you are learning to something you have learnt. The audio was an important element too, the spoken relationship between teacher and learner which accompanies the movement of the hands.

I'm planning to make a second version of this work but looking at lace-making as the subject of the video instead of knot-tying. I'd really lie to explore that intricate craft process and the sense flow that it creates. It was also a very playful studio week and I re-remembered many things I was interested in years ago. Particularly quipus and Polynesian stick charts which I am planning to develop further.

Many thanks to Blair Todd, Richard Hopkins, Jessie Blindell and Ann Ball.

(All photos by Steve Tanner)

Supporting structures of a temporary nature was a presentation of new work produced during a residency at the Florence Trust, London.

It comprised an installation involving a series of seemingly fragile wooden shelving, a large variety of collected materials, hand-made netting of cotton thread, living plants and screen prints of fine grid patterns.