In 1990, Jo Stockham worked in Cambridge as Henry Moore Artist Fellow at Kettle’s Yard and Corpus Christi College.
Her studio was the first practical science laboratory, now disused, for women students at the University, and among the people working around her were scientists, engineers and historians.
Enquiry into the relationship between our personal experiences and events around us is a feature of Stockham’s work. Her recent installations have been inspired by the backgrounds of the places in which she has worked and have involved historical research as well as combining different materials and processes, such as sculpture, printmaking and photography.
Working in an environment of experiments and testing offered fresh possibilities. The pieces from her residency at Cambridge refer to anatomical diagrams, view through microscopes and to early globes and planetariums devised to show our place on a larger world. In these, and in new work completed for the show at Camden, imaginative juxtapositions of materials like sugar, lace, glass and steel, are made alongside unexpected shifts in scale.