Never the Straightest Path: Jo Dennis
Upcoming exhibition
Overview
Opening
Thursday, 26.03 at 6 – 8 PM
Jo Dennis
Surrounded by materials that carry limitless layers of functional and associative value, Dennis uses a mixture of painting, sculpture and relief to tread a path between illusion and fact.
A combination of sophistication and pragmatism allows her to begin working each time, full of hope. The method she uses, and its subsequent result, negotiates a path between a place, space or ‘scape’ of personal as well as collective memory, and the nonetheless often thwarted pursuit of the hitherto unseen. With drenched, laden, layered surfaces, in warm and worn combinations of image and association, Dennis represents a relation to time and a negotiation of material that she has in turn collected over time.
A clock hangs off the apparent drying rack structure of the free-standing sculpture ‘Needful Things’ 2026. Scraps of material hang, like rags attached to a tree, to mark the territory of the past. The second-hand canvas army tent, used by Dennis as a base for paint and marble dust, with layers of action are often broken up to be used as a base, making a three-dimensional indication of actuality. Steel frames allow for an inside and outside of fact. Hanging swathes of canvas acts as evidence of worn, past life itself, as Dennis’s whole process of making something new comes up against – and utilizes – that which is already there.
No path is truly straight, however, and darkness can get in the way.
Wishing to be as free as possible at the beginning of a hopefully flexible and dexterous creative process, the nagging question about when and where something should come into play will remain. Nothing really generic exists; the use of junk jewellery, collected from junk shops, markets, or the street, for instance, can never be pure. The brain is led to the creation of a surreal physical state.
This resolute work is about a negotiation of physical encounter in which layers of an assumed shared artistic rule, resolve, and direction jostle to allow a mark, puddle, or pool of colour to dominate the surface. With such a suggestion, the slapping flat down of an image and hopefully a sense of place in a deliberately limited palette, a front goes pictorially to the middle and sometimes even through to the back. Dennis insists on finding a kind of surreal ‘scape’, or place as suggestion. This suggestion, in turn, arrives in a language that is neither written nor said, but is, instead, in a visual mix of paint object, with a tent as a base. Dennis’s work with what is there mourns loss as well as celebrates gain in the same language, at the same time.
Sacha Craddock, March 2026
Surrounded by materials that carry limitless layers of functional and associative value, Dennis uses a mixture of painting, sculpture and relief to tread a path between illusion and fact.
A combination of sophistication and pragmatism allows her to begin working each time, full of hope. The method she uses, and its subsequent result, negotiates a path between a place, space or ‘scape’ of personal as well as collective memory, and the nonetheless often thwarted pursuit of the hitherto unseen. With drenched, laden, layered surfaces, in warm and worn combinations of image and association, Dennis represents a relation to time and a negotiation of material that she has in turn collected over time.
A clock hangs off the apparent drying rack structure of the free-standing sculpture ‘Needful Things’ 2026. Scraps of material hang, like rags attached to a tree, to mark the territory of the past. The second-hand canvas army tent, used by Dennis as a base for paint and marble dust, with layers of action are often broken up to be used as a base, making a three-dimensional indication of actuality. Steel frames allow for an inside and outside of fact. Hanging swathes of canvas acts as evidence of worn, past life itself, as Dennis’s whole process of making something new comes up against – and utilizes – that which is already there.
No path is truly straight, however, and darkness can get in the way.
Wishing to be as free as possible at the beginning of a hopefully flexible and dexterous creative process, the nagging question about when and where something should come into play will remain. Nothing really generic exists; the use of junk jewellery, collected from junk shops, markets, or the street, for instance, can never be pure. The brain is led to the creation of a surreal physical state.
This resolute work is about a negotiation of physical encounter in which layers of an assumed shared artistic rule, resolve, and direction jostle to allow a mark, puddle, or pool of colour to dominate the surface. With such a suggestion, the slapping flat down of an image and hopefully a sense of place in a deliberately limited palette, a front goes pictorially to the middle and sometimes even through to the back. Dennis insists on finding a kind of surreal ‘scape’, or place as suggestion. This suggestion, in turn, arrives in a language that is neither written nor said, but is, instead, in a visual mix of paint object, with a tent as a base. Dennis’s work with what is there mourns loss as well as celebrates gain in the same language, at the same time.
Sacha Craddock, March 2026