About

Jo Pearl is a multi-disciplinary artist working in clay, a provocateur using this benign material to elicit emotional reactions. Her practice is also a celebration of the materiality of clay and its diverse states of being. She brings clay to life, through kinetic sculpture, emotional portraiture, haptic abstract forms and combining clay stop-motion with fired ceramics. Sculpting, she often keeps the raw clay malleable, constantly evolving her forms, while capturing each iteration photographically with stop-motion software to weave a narrative into film. After the shoot, she may kiln-fire the outcomes, transforming them from clay to ceramic as though in suspended animation. This use of film is not only an environmental choice, to minimise her kiln-firings, but also allows her to magically breathe life into the work – like a mythical golem. By combining claymation and ceramics Jo can explore notions of the fleeting and the timeless, agency and alchemy.

“I create my golems to protect me from the pogroms of reality”

Jan Švankmajer

Her practice is politically engaged, concerned with existential problems facing humanity: air pollution’s impact on health, modern slavery, emotional illiteracy in a digital world, the biodiversity of healthy soil.

Since graduating in 2019 with BA Ceramic Design (1:1) from Central Saint Martins, Jo has developed various income strands from portrait and exhibition commissions, clay public engagement workshops to open up conversations in the public domain using clay, to ‘clayscribing’ – a new genre of visual annotation of business meetings, live-sculpted in raw clay. She has had several solo shows, and been involved in a series of significant exhibitions hosted by English Heritage, Norwich Cathedral and Ceramic Art London. Indeed, she co-curated ‘On Air’ for CAL, a show about air pollution.