Jo Stockham

      
Jo Stockham
Royal College of Art
jo.stockham@rca.ac.uk
rca.ac.uk


Biography

Jo Stockham is an artist working primarily with print and installation. She often deals with the histories of a site, environment and community, using found materials and archive sources. Her current work explores the histories of technology and manufacturing as a subject. She is Professor of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art and current research projects includes an examination of the languages surrounding computing, craft and materiality. She has exhibited widely and undertaken research residencies as Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (1989) The Mead Gallery, University of Warwick (1997), Yaddo, New York 2001 and Wimbledon Centre for Drawing 2007.

Illustrated Talk

No Map No Body
In my role as Head of the Printmaking Program at the Royal College of Art I have worked to open up the definitions of print practice to include the world of printed ephemera and the legacies of conceptual practices where text or information constitutes the work. Those practices which mine the archive and the history of technical images (maps, diagrams, advertising material) both in print and now increasingly floating as data on the web are central to many the work of many contemporary artists.

In the talk I will use my own work but also that of some of the many students I have worked with over the past 14 years to explore the inherently cross disciplinary practice of print which cannot fail to connect with industrial histories and forms of both commerce and politics. The mapping of landscape but also of the body both sites of exploration for the artist and the curious explorer are recurrent tropes in both my own work and that of many students whose work has been made in the context of the print program at the RCA.

My own work as an artist often uses archive source to re-animate and bring to “life”; bring live attention to the past and has explicitly used maps, found documentary images and biomedical images as a source. Working across the boundaries of sculpture, print, and architecture all of which I have considerable experience of teaching gives me a particular perspective on the nature of these migrations. I will give a paper accompanied by images, which draws together these threads and looks at practices which seek to re-embody the archive or information and thus question the divide between craft based and conceptual practices, body and mind.