JO DENNIS
A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER
NOVEMBER 15, 2025 — JANUARY 3, 2026
CARVALHO, NEW YORK
A ruin carves beauty out of destruction. What was once whole and functional has been broken apart, deserted and lost its original use. The lives and histories that passed through the property, and unknowingly intersected, suddenly come alive. Ruins appear haunted; the delineations between life and death, form and fragmentation, are no longer absolute. This is why ruins are often considered sites of fantasy, transgression and play. At the same time, ruins are born out of cycles of industrial revolution and devolution, capitalist development and the ceaseless pursuit of profit; they are what remains of cities afflicted by war. The ruin as a stage for possibility and the unexpected, as well as a form of testimony to political crisis, shadows the family of sculptures in Jo Dennis’s first solo presentation of her work exclusively in this discipline.
Each sculptural assemblage is comprised of found materials and objects that carry the weight of their abandoned lives. Like us, they have memories. Dennis tells me that she sources military tents from the North of England, and when they arrive at the studio, they’re covered in mud. Their memory of that landscape and their former function as shelters against its inhospitable weather leaves a palpable material trace. Dennis washes the fabric carefully before she begins to paint. But the sculptures that arise from this process remember their origins in small yet evocative details. Zips, buckles, rivets, fastenings and toggles that once gave the tent its three-dimensional shape remain visible at the sculptures’ edges. On fabric that now recalls sumptuous Renaissance drapery, they are moments of recognition, an abstract visual language of their own, distinct from the painterly gestures that cover the surface they frame. These structural elements remind us where the tent might be entered and give the sculptures the feeling of dens—the haphazard, furtive sanctuaries of childhood—even in their current state, in which fabric clings to the wooden and metal spokes with an air of dilapidation.
Essay by Rebecca Birrell, PhD
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