Biography

Jo Addison makes objects in which a familiar world is disclosed through the reinterpretation of everyday objects and motifs. Her work draws on the crossovers between individual recollection and shared cultural memories. In Addison’s process, her decisions are governed by the behaviour of materials, individually and in relation to one another, meaning that individual works assimilate the physical conditions in which they are made. During necessarily short, intense studio sessions in between teaching and parenting, she works with components and materials that she keeps deliberately close to hand, in order to enable a responsive approach to the thing she is making. In work that is apparently casually and speedily made, the legacy of a repetitive and a paradoxically slow process is disclosed.

Jo is particularly interested in the synthesis of making and learning. Alongside her studio practice, she has always worked within education, in both museum and higher education sectors. Through performance events designed to stage the act of learning beyond the constraints of academia, her long-term collaborative research with Natasha Kidd Natasha Kidd explores learning as form. Jo lives and works in London.

Jo is a founding member of A Particular Reality, and Material, Pedagogy, Future.