Beast of Burden, 2022
Oil, household, acrylic and spray paint, various fabrics, metal clothing rail
164 x 166 x 56 cm

Do waste materials have a purpose? This question does not come from the popular RRR - reduce, reuse, and recycle but from the assemblage that is Jo Dennis’ art work. Dennis is a master of collecting what many think is rubbish and incorporating them to create something transformative. Her work addresses our emotional connection to places, the transformation of surfaces and objects and how this relates to temporality.

Jo Dennis’ art appeals to us all because she welcomes back the missed and forgotten into our lives, and creates an avenue where we can lose ourselves in their stories. Jo Dennis is a visual artist who is known for constructing sculptural studies in paint and building environments out of recycled objects. Many popular platforms like Financial Times Magazine, British Journal of Photography, The Washington Post, Unseen Platform, The Art Newspaper, Port, Fad Magazine, White Walls, and AnOther have featured her in their pages.

In 2020 she self-published her artists book �?I touched this with my hand, I touched that with my eye’ with an essay by the curator David Campany. But what is so unique about her art style that has people talking? Living and working in London for the past 20 years, Jo Dennis has employed diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums including installation, assemblage, painting, found objects and photography. Dennis says she is intrigued by the ways in which a feeling of place is realized in relation to abandoned and decaying areas. How we project our own emotional memories into such areas, and in a similar way, how a used object that has been found might emit a certain energy and be elevated. She finds inspiration in the actual topography of the city, the unkempt patchwork of painterly surfaces produced by ad hoc patching and entropy.

She is drawn to the gaps in between things, the rail-track edges, and the trash-filled alleyways. In order to conduct her research, she gathers and photographs various locations and objects. She buys recently used stuff on eBay and picks up street trash. Painting and assemblage are used by Dennis as a response to this material.

Read Full Interview in our Issue 8