Friday Focus: Jo Coupe
Jo Coupe is a visual artist, working mostly in sculpture. She was born in 1975 in Stoke on Trent and studied at Newcastle University and later at Goldsmith’s College. She lives in the North East of England with her three children and two cats and teaches at Newcastle University. She has work in public and private collections internationally including, 21st Century Museum, Kentucky; Progressive Art Collection, Ohio and Zabludowicz Collection, London.
Projects have included a residency with Rio Tinto Alcan (UK) and commissions for Tatton Park Biennial (Cheshire, UK) and Durham Castle (Durham, UK) as well as solo exhibitions All That Fall, Workplace Gallery (London, UK), The Ashes of Other Elements, Workplace Gallery (Gateshead, UK) and A Distance between Two Points, Airspace Gallery (Stoke on Trent, UK) and group exhibitions Hinterlands at Baltic (Gateshead, UK) and Innsbruck International (Innsbruck, Austria).
Can you tell me about your practice? How do you get started on a piece of work?
My work includes installation, objects, sound, video, photography and performance. It’s underpinned by a fascination with the living world and the interconnected processes of growth and decay and explores what live-ness might mean within the context of sculpture. Live sculptures which change over time and studio-based pieces emerge from exploration and research into materials, processes and to different contexts, which have included an 11th century Castle and an aluminium smelter. What I’m interested in is undermining through these works what appears to be solid and stable and revealing invisible forces, unseen patterns and the fluid and shifting nature of all materials.
I often start with particular materials, contexts or ideas that I feel have a relationship to one another or awkwardly butt up to one another, creating a kind of friction. My working processes are hugely varied but often involve an initial stage of analysing things (materials, ideas, objects), taking them apart and getting under the surface before recombining them. I’m interested in creating an odd kind of poetry from what this process throws up.
After the Rain, for example emerged from an extended period of research into electricity and magnetism, an awareness of how a complex network of power connects us and the huge physical presence this has on a landscape. It began as a personal enquiry into the noise from pylons, which can be felt in the body as much as heard. This became a desire to capture the sound from a particular pylon in a managed woodland near my studio at the time and conjure up its presence somewhere else. Recorded with DIY devices to focus soundwaves, a soundtrack emerged, interwoven with the sounds of bees, birds, a plane overhead, and a car in the nearby carpark.
Who or what are your biggest influences?
I’ve always been really interested in the Arte Povera movement which emerged from the industrial north of Italy in the 1960’s and 70s. I’m particularly interested in the work of Giovanni Anselmo who took the language of sculpture to a different place, playing with physical tension, gravity and in the work using materials with contrasting textures and forms like granite and lettuce, in Untitled (Sculpture that Eats). This work has a kind of performative element, and highlights the mechanisms of care around the work, in ways that connect closely with my own concerns.
Exploring narratives around the natural world, change and decay is often a central theme within your work, can you talk further about this?
Exploring the material world around me and allowing this curiosity to feed and inform my work is something I’ve always done. I’m constantly fascinated by the dynamics of decay, by the fragility of all materials and the relationship of this to growth, to life and death. The idea that nothing stays the same, everything is changing, shifting all the time, and maintaining any sense of solidity and permanence is a constant game that humans play is something I find endlessly fascinating. That change is the only real certainty might seem to be an obvious point but when I really allow myself to feel this, it feels destabilising and vertiginous in a way that permeates all my thinking. The difficulty in my work is resisting the urge to fix things or pin them down, to allow things to change or set up the conditions by which they develop over time can be a challenge but it’s something I’m constantly drawn to.
Materials are everything in my work – the basis of an initial investigation and play, the way this then manifests itself in the work through physical touch, active processes, and then the physical qualities and associations they bring to the work. I have a particular interest in bringing together materials that don’t seem to fit together like fungus and gold, playing with the awkward friction between the languages. An idea, or a material/process might come first, then
the two tend to evolve alongside one another, become woven together so they’re inextricably linked in the work. My series of ‘cutout’ pieces (eg Lagniappe) are a good example of this. Lagniappe (lænjæp/ LAN-yap), is a Louisiana word for a bonus or something extra, is one of a series of works which play with sculptural mass, excess and precariousness through
something between an image and an object. This work contains all 40 lithographic illustrations by Ivy Massee for 'British Fungi with a chapter on Lichens', cut out then reassembled. My interest in botany and plant taxonomy, from its colonial roots to shifting fashions in botanical illustration inform what this might reveal about a particular time and place. Foregrounding the hidden labour of the (often female) illustrators, the work disavows the idea of nature as passive and fixed, making visible the multiple processes of reframing and control in our understanding of it.
I use a broad range of materials and processes in my work, so there isn’t one thing that I use every day. There are some tools that I return to a lot though and always seems to do something useful or exciting, lots of which are borrowed from other fields of making like jewellery or dentistry. Here’s a list of some of them: Scalpel - I have so many of these and use them a lot in the cut-out pieces (like Lagniappe) but in lots of other work too; my jeweller’s saw, particularly the ping the blade makes when you get the tension right; my Dremel drill; dental files; the centrifugal casting machine which I bought in New Orleans nearly 20 years ago, which I’ve used to cast all the metal plants and animals since then.
I read The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the world by Michael Pollan when it was published over 20 years ago. It’s a really interesting book about the relationship between plants and humans, how we’ve co-opted and exaggerated their features for our own purposes and needs, but in a way that might also be seen to benefit the plants, facilitating their reproduction and care. It focuses on four species of plants: tulip, potato, marijuana; apple and looks at how we’ve selectively bred and manipulated them. I enjoy books that probe or question my assumptions about our relationship with the natural world. The Botany of Desire seems to contradict everything we might think about human-plant interactions and explores the idea that it could be thought of as a more mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s also just a series of fascinating stories about what humans want and how these have developed in tandem with these hugely important plant species.
I’ve also been influenced by a short story by Patrick Süskind called Maître Mussard’s Bequest about a jeweller who moves to the country and makes a discovery in his garden that begins to consume him. There’s an evident fascination with the stuff the world is made of that I always find intriguing as well as a slightly menacing tone which builds as the story reveals itself.
Finally, is there anything new coming up that you would like to tell us about?
My most recent project is a collaboration with a snow physicist. This research is informed by work at the Centre for Snow Studies on Grenoble, France and looks at how the crisp edges and symmetrical shapes of newly formed snow crystals evolve under changing conditions and the inherent challenges for the warm humans observing this.