Jo Dennis British, b. 1973
"A great accomplishment of Jo Dennis’s paintings is that, while much work has transpired in their making, they are never laboured. The up-cycled tent offers a material metaphor and loaded substrate to support a painting that can at once reach back and push forward into one's life and painting’s history."
–John Slyce
Jo Dennis, born in 1973 in Forres, Scotland, is a British artist who works and lives in London. She completed a BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College (2002) and MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2022). Dennis is the co-founder of Asylum and Maverick Projects, an artist lead organisation running project spaces in London. From 2016–18, Dennis founded and curated AMP Gallery, a not-for-profit gallery, and is the co-founder of Pigeon Park and Peckham 24 Photography Festival.
Jo Dennis is at home in the interstitial spaces of a city at its post-industrial margins. She is a collector of materialities. Her work explores what a painting might be in our here and now while acknowledging the legacies painting and painters have left and draw upon still. The materiality of tents—their military context, connotation, or function as metaphor or signifier—is hugely important to her work. Dennis paints on a support meant to repel liquid. Her paintings—be them stretched, or stretched but still proposing disruptions to the flat picture plane, or un-stretched and inhabiting space as installation or sculpture—come forward with a lightness of touch where the structure given by the support suggests moves and planes to be negotiated by colour and mark. A great accomplishment of Jo Dennis’s paintings is that, while much work has transpired in their making, they are never laboured. The up-cycled tent offers a material metaphor and loaded substrate to support a painting that can at once reach back and push forward into one's life and painting’s history.
