Jo Harris
London based musician and artist Jo Harris works in ink and thread. Her work has its roots in the physical activity and sensation of production – a development from, and response to, her studies as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music and King’s College London.
Her current work involves fluid but tightly controlled fine movements that mirror the physical aspects of musical creation: the bodily ‘performance’ of the work is central to its artistic intention. The works have clear beginnings and ends in which the ‘expositions’ and ‘cadences’ contain and control inherently free forms.
The abstract pieces are individual responses to a series of original physical blueprints. The resultant works grow out of the initial artistic DNA, but their innate physicality is determined and constrained by the large forms. By limiting the potentially infinite growth of the material these works suggest natural energies or organisms.
The ‘elemental’ works are based on aspects of nature; nevertheless, their abstract structures, and their construction from highly controlled physical movements, bind them conceptually to the more abstract works.
