Artist Story: Jo Coupe

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

My work, which encompasses installation, objects, sound and performance, explores liveness within the context of sculpture. The work is underpinned by a fascination with the interconnected processes of decay and the narrative and metaphorical potential that these represent. Live sculptures and studio-based pieces emerge from exploration and research into new materials, processes and contexts. As a whole, these works seek to burrow under the surface, undermining what appears to be solid and stable, revealing invisible forces, unseen patterns and the fluid and shifting nature of all materials.

I was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1975 and I’ve been an artist for over 20 years. Growing up, I don’t think I had any concept of what being an artist meant – a living one at least. My family were in the building trade and I didn’t know anyone who’d pursued a creative career, so that didn’t feel like something I could aspire to. I loved making things and drawing, looking at and discussing art but there were virtually no contemporary art spaces in Stoke at the time, so it was hard to see a connection between what living artists were doing and my own interests. This only kicked in when I started visiting my sister in London and seeing exhibitions there. What did become useful later on was that many members of my family were running businesses, so I was familiar with the irregular – and sometimes long – hours, some sense of autonomy over your working life, and the often fuzzy boundary between work and home life.

When I was about seven or eight, I had a teacher at primary school who dissected some meat (brought in by a classmate, the local butcher’s daughter) in front of us. Looking at the cow’s lungs and stomach, I really clearly remember feeling a shift between a previously held image of my internal organs floating around my body, tethered by fleshy chords and anchors, to a sense of them packed tightly inside me, in tension and contained by a thin membrane of muscle and skin. I remember the sensation of awe at the precariousness of that. That feeling, and a more general curiosity about the world around me, have been a key part of my drive to make work.

I went on to study fine art, graduating from Newcastle University in 1998. I don’t remember having much sense of where that might lead until the final year. After I graduated from university though, I knew I wanted to continue making work and doing what I was doing, so I had to learn quickly how to survive as a self-employed artist. There weren’t many art students staying in the north east of England after graduating in the 1990s, so I was lucky to be part of a small group of graduates who were starting to build lives and practices in Newcastle. I was also selected for a grant from Arts Council England (or Northern Arts as it was then), which gave me some money and free studio space for a couple of years.

Fungi are a recurring motif and material in your work. What is it about fungi that particularly interests you? And why do you sometimes cover forms from the natural world in precious materials and gemstones?

I’m not sure where this came from, but I’ve always been interested in fungi, their abundant variety in form and habitat, how they appear to emerge from nowhere and disappear just as quickly, fragile yet powerful enough to force their way up through concrete. When I was a student, I started foraging for mushrooms and would take them apart, draw them or just watch them turn to inky black liquid. I’m also intrigued by their position within folklore and popular cultures, where they often inspire a mixture of fascination and fear. Many of my works address these ideas implicitly, but some use fungal forms or imagery more directly.

I’ve made a series of works with the prefix ‘femmer’ – a beautiful Geordie word meaning delicate or fragile. These works use foraged bracket fungi, the kind you see growing like shelves from the trunk of a tree, which I dry before encrusting their surfaces with gold leaf and lab-grown synthetic gems. For me, there is a friction between the fungus – base, seasonal, ephemeral, parasitic – emerging from the gallery wall, and the lushness and permanence of this highly embellished skin, which I find exciting.

In another work, Infester (2008), tiny bronze casts of beech mushrooms infiltrate the stairwells and dark spaces, appearing to grow from cracks in the gallery walls, a hint at what might lie beneath the surface. While Lagniappe (2021), exhibited as part of ‘Hinterlands’ at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2022-23), brings together all of Ivy Massee’s illustrations from the book British Fungi with a chapter on Lichens (1911), cut-out and reassembled into one vertiginous, overloaded composition, hovering somewhere between an image and a sculpture and making visible the hidden labour of the (often female) illustrators.

Is the possibility of failure – or at the least the possibility of unexpected outcomes – important to your practice?

Decay – often related to fungi of course – and more specifically an interest in the processes by which decomposition happens, whether physical, chemical or biological, is an ongoing fascination. From my earliest days making work, I’ve been drawn to using materials like offal, fruit, jelly and mould that were fluid or impermanent in some way, that decomposed or grew, and I revelled in their messy materiality. Of course, all materials are changing all the time, but the materials that drew me were shifting in a way and at a pace that was very visible. I was, and still am, attracted to the liveness of these materials, the way they changed in real time and the lack of fixedness or completeness in these processes and the potential in this.

I’ve employed explicitly temporal materials to create a series of pieces which grow and decay or change over time. In these live sculptures, the possibility of failure, or at least of unexpected outcomes, is almost inevitable – you can control conditions and prepare for different eventualities, but it can be the thing you hadn’t thought of that can alter the direction the work takes. Exhibiting this work can be difficult and at times I’ve wrestled with the practical challenges it’s posed. I’ve had some interesting installs and taken troubled phone calls from curators, wondering how to deal with a cracking table or floating clouds of mould in tanks of copper sulphate. Other practical concerns keep me thinking or force me to slow down – the inherent seasonality of particular ideas, materials or processes or dependence on specific temperature, humidity or physical space in order for the work to exist. All these things that make exhibiting a challenge are also the things that keep me excited – there’s always more to explore and learn from these live sculptures.

How do you decide when a work is finished? Is it important to keep things constantly in flux?

Over the past ten years or so, building on these lines of enquiry, and following a body of work created for the basement of an aluminium smelter, I’ve been making works that explore other, perhaps more oblique, kinds of liveness. In these, my interest in the fleeting shifted towards using magnetism and electricity to create precarious works, contingent on a power supply or magnetic field. In these works, as in all my work, time is a constant undercurrent, sometimes really obviously in terms of how the work is changing in real time, often in more subtle ways, cutting through different fields of time. Perhaps because of my interest in the never-finished or in flux, it can be difficult to determine when a piece is complete. I often want to revisit work or continue to let it grow – with some work there’s not an optimum point at which it’s fully itself, but rather it’s on a continuum. Documentation, for this reason, is critical – there’s not one single best image, often requiring many different images or videos taken at different times to capture the work fully. I learned early – and very painfully – that if you make works that only last for a short period of time, you need to be very disciplined about documenting them properly or make your peace with the fact that they exist in your mind and the memories of the audience. This includes one work from an early Vane show which resulted in a whole roll of nearly-black slide photos. I’ve resisted making documentation of the work into work in its own right – for me that would feel like a way of fixing or pinning down, something that’s at odds with my intentions for the work.

How important is collaboration and working with professionals and practitioners from other disciplines? Do you enjoy research as much as you enjoy making?

Some of the most fruitful periods of work for me have evolved from working in new and unfamiliar environments; a commission for the 11th century Durham Castle and a residency in an aluminium smelter for instance. The ideas that emerge from these periods of research are vital, allowing new ideas, materials, processes to filter into my work. I find exploring and immersing myself in new spaces and contexts, and talking with other people really feeds my work. Often the tendrils of these periods continue for many years. When I start working on these longer projects, I tend not to have an idea of how the work will look, but more what I want it to do. From my MA at Goldsmiths in London, I learned that what works best for me is to work on research-based projects alongside more intuitive studio pieces, allowing these to feed into one another in sometimes unexpected ways.

Currently I’m working on a research partnership with snow physicist Melody Sandells, which looks at snow as a material, examining, from a sculptural perspective, the evolution of natural snow crystals over time and in response to changing conditions. The initial stages of this research will look at the micro-structure of snow crystals, how the crisp edges and symmetrical shapes of newly formed structures evolve under changing conditions into more complex and chaotic or smoother, more rounded forms. We’ll also be exploring the challenges of observing snow crystals, which requires specific equipment and conditions at odds with the warm humans who seek to study them.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

My first contact with Vane was as a participant, back in 1998, when it hosted an annual, open access visual arts event, Vane98. It was my first show after finishing my undergraduate degree at Newcastle University. Working in a suite of three old office spaces near Central Station, Newcastle, I spent a day and a night in each room, working in turn, playing with a different material, repetitively taking apart baby’s cardigans or lighting boxes of matches one by one.

I wasn’t very aware of what was going on locally when I was studying and taking part in Vane98 gave me a taste of what I was stepping into. I remember meetings in the basement of the Head of Steam pub and feeling a sense of community. It also gave me a different view of the city and region, of the empty shop and office spaces that were a feature of Newcastle and Gateshead at the end of the early 1990s recession (and are again now) and the power that artists have collectively, to have an impact on the place where they live and work.

Vane gave me the freedom to carry on making work, with something to work towards – to join forces with other artists, organise ourselves, to get work out into the world and talk about it… some of the things I love about being an artist. It felt like a supportive environment. I took part in two subsequent festivals, each pushing me in different ways and helping sow the seeds for much work that came after. I was also selected for a couple of opportunities off the back of these shows, including a show in Manchester (part of the LMN collaborative project between artist-led initiatives in Liverpool, Manchester and Vane in Newcastle) and ‘Vane Export’ at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. This was my first show outside the UK, and in partnership with BALTIC in addition to Vane, so a really important next step for me.

It also gave me a different view of the city and region, of the empty shop and office spaces that were a feature of Newcastle and Gateshead at the end of the early 1990s recession (and are again now) and the power that artists collectively have to make an impact on the place where they live and work.

Interview by Stephen Palmer