SOIL: The World at our Feet 23 Jan – 13 April 2025
Oddkin celebrates the awe-inspiring biodiversity found in the healthy soil where every cup of earth contains around 200 billion bacteria. Sculpting these microscopic organisms, Pearl makes the invisible – visible, revealing their myriad of unexpected forms.
The work’s title alludes to critical thinker Donna Haraway’s coinage ‘making oddkin’, which describes the need for novel combinations of, and collaborations between humans and non-humans, without whom there is no food or life on earth.
Pearl’s installation of ceramic nematodes, rotifers, bacteria, and protozoa appear like a constellation, each micro-organism hanging by a thread. Shadows amplify them, and parallax illusions make them appear to move and dance. Oddkin is intended to enchant, to encourage viewers to fall in love with the beings that live in soil, to recognise that they are our odd kin.
Jo Pearl’s suspended morphology, multiplied in dancing shadows, of curious little forms – twisting spirals, feathery roots, tiny sculptural bodies – seems to be made of silk or cloth, but is in fact fashioned of the very clay of this earth.
Laura Cumming, The Observer
Jo Pearl Sculpture 