Jo WILSON

biography:

Jo Wilson’s sculpture is inspired in part by the contents of her father’s factory. The artist has taken delight in the industrial trappings of this mechanised workspace.

She has found mysterious beauty in sections of machinery, discarded workshop objects, sprockets, offcuts and fragments, which she has reconstructed and repurposed into elegant abstract forms.

The resulting objects are strangely familiar, yet also enigmatic. A discarded sheet of pressed cardboard, rescued from the factory floor and cast in bronze, is  now eternal; the utilitarian roll of sticky-tape, cast in the same permanent  metal, becomes a poetic relic of the age, as intriguing as any Bronze Age artefact.

Elsewhere, circular wooden forms have been constructed, with concentric rings emanating from the centre-point. These mandala-like objects suggest shields,  or charts of the cosmos as they set out the trajectory of their own enclosed  universes.

In Wilson’s work, we may find echoes in the sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși, or British artist Eduardo Paolozzi, the godfather of British Pop  Art, who also saw the sculptural potential in the detritus of contemporary life.