For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

- E. E. Cummings

Motion. Memory. Mood. Freedom.

Since moving to live by the coast, Jo’s corpus of artworks has continued to be informed and inflected by the power and energy of the ocean. Her paintings invoke and conjure the extremity of the weather, the vast space of an open beach, the intense vibrancy of reflections on wet sand – and, of course, the waves that ebb, and flow – and crash – unrelentingly.

The universal appeal – and pertinence – of Jo’s mixed-media work is evidenced by the geographical spread of her collectors, who can be found worldwide: throughout the UK, across Europe, and beyond.

BA in Fine Art – Sculpture. Lancashire

Jo’s practise focused predominantly on human suffering ie famine and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Mediums explored included welding metal, plaster, fabrics and photography.

PGCE in Art & Design Secondary Education. Brighton

Followed by a decade plus of teaching in Schools and Colleges.

2001 Jo took the plunge to focus on her fine art, initially balancing other self-employed paths, until life took an unexpected traumatic turn.

A move back to the coast, saw Jo, rebuilding her love of expressing through Art, and effectively healing through connecting with the ocean and coastal environment.

Further art developments in her expression came about when Jo returned to study 2019…

MA in Contemporary Dialogues – Fine Art. Trinity St David, Swansea.

Today, Jo focuses on the ocean: its movement, untameable spirit and distinct shapes that characterise its motion and action. The process of creativity is messy, untamed, and reflective of how Jo relates to her surrounding coastline: the open ocean and nature in their rawest forms.

For me, it’s the sea...I am most at home among the open waves, on the vast wild Gower beach – the wind blowing through my hair, salty fresh sea air smacking my face; the sounds of untameable waves – whether calm or the more intense smashing and crashing of the waves, beating and spraying...all is unkempt: free from human intervention.

My work explores and communicates this intensity, bringing the ocean – its power, its energy – to the interior of a family home or indoor environment. I seek to breach the divide between human, inhabited spaces with nature’s wild ones: those which are free from boundaries or constraints of any sort.

What could be more poignant than the bridging of the divide between human-enforced suffering and pain with the true, raw, wild freedom of nature and the ocean?

Jo’s own life journey may be discerned in the ways in which she expresses herself creatively – but her work can take all of us on that journey of ultimately letting go, breaking free from constraints and emotional captivity. Allow her paintings to draw you in – and take you to the spaces that her art evokes.

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