Monumental Manifestations: Josie KO on the year ahead

If you were lucky enough to see one of Josie KO’s sculptures over the past year – perhaps at the Royal Scottish Academy’s (RSA) New Contemporaries, or as part of Fruitmarket’s group exhibition Poor Things, you can attest to the experience of being in the room with one of her art works. The artist's contribution to the 2023 rendition of RSA New Contemporaries was an evocative sculpture titled Lady In Blue, which immediately captured your attention as soon as you began climbing the stairs to the upper gallery.

The Skinny selected Josie KO as the winner of the 2023 Skinny Prize from this cohort of graduates for her bold and brave large scale sculptural works, which address the intricacies and contradictions of national identities and whether people of colour, Black women specifically, identify (or not) with these identities. The distinct hand-built nature of KO’s works (which are often collaborative) are a joy to experience – there is evidence of a real zest, energy and joy in making with one’s hands. The sheer size of many of her sculptures, which often force the viewer to look up, also makes us question who is (and isn’t) represented in Britain’s civic spaces. 

While KO’s work satirises these problematic monuments (often to colonists and slave traders), her work is a vital and timely reminder that artists should be playing a crucial and critical role in deciding what fills our public spaces. The scale of the works also counters the erasure of Black women from Western art history and the continued marginalisation of contemporary Black women artists. She affords these Black female figures the same attention and veneration so often only enshrined to white men, paintings and statues of whom fill our historic galleries and civic spaces. 

2023 was a busy year for the artist, as she finished her full-time role at The Glasgow School of Art Students Association (GSASA) and transitioned into becoming a full time, freelance artist. KO graduated from The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in 2021, having spent two academic years without access to a studio. She describes having to make casts in her bedroom during this time, as students were still expected to make work during the pandemic despite zero studio access. "It is so interesting how limitations can really be such a benefit, and I think I’ve definitely seen that play out in my practice. I’d say I have more resources (now), but the resources are still limited." The pandemic necessitated creatives to become even more resourceful and resilient, and KO appears to have taken it fully in her stride – despite the challenges of the cost-of-living crisis, skyrocketing rents and funding cuts which continue to make artists’ lives difficult.  

In September of last year, just after finishing full time work at GSASA, KO travelled to the Isle of Eigg for a residency at The Bothy Project, which was awarded by The Bothy Project and Visual Arts Scotland. She also had a residency with ANAM, a collective based in Glasgow that brings artists and musicians together to collaborate and produce a final exhibition, which took place at the tail end of 2023. She also successfully applied for a residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Aberdeenshire, where she stayed for the whole month of November, focusing on making ceramics.

She describes the experience as being integral to the development of her practice: "I think my new chapter as an artist is working more with ceramics as well as papier mâché, finding the similarities between the materials and still exploring a tactile and very responsive material, but also learning the technical aspects of it. In GSA and many art schools, the ceramics departments have closed down. And while there are so many things I could do with ceramics, I was really drawn to doing hand building and looking at how intuition could play a role in my practice. I'm Nigerian, so I've seen a lot of hand building ceramics work and craft makers growing up in Nigeria, but I've never actually been taught that or learned that practice. So it's kind of fun to see how I can incorporate this unknown practice into my work. It's still very early days, but I'm just really enjoying hand building and seeing where that takes me."

The artist is continuing this exploration at a ceramics studio in Glasgow as she excitingly produces work for an exhibition for Glasgow International in June this year. In collaboration with fellow Glasgow-based artist Kialy Tihngang, the two artists are exploring Black presences in Scotland and Ireland in the pre-colonial era. The two artists are working from written recordings of the ‘Fir Gorma’, or ‘Blue Men’ documented in Scotland after the Viking invasion, the discovery of which signals that Black people were present in Scotland and the Gaelic world from at least the ninth century. KO and Tihngang’s exhibition will speculatively contextualise this archival account with their own experiences as Black women living in Scotland. KO describes the pair’s process as "kind of playing with the idea of speculation, daydreaming and taking over archives and making our own narrative of these Black people who were in Scotland – and asking what their lives would've looked like. We are trying to really emphasise Black British but specifically Black Scottish identity. We're coming from it from the perspective of being from England, but we're also working collaboratively with Scottish artists and now also some Black Irish artists to talk about the term and how we relate to it in different ways."

I ask KO about who, or what, is inspiring her right now. The artist Tschabalala Self is one current source of inspiration. With her epic, figurative collaged textile works, you can certainly see the parallels with KO’s shapely and statuesque sculptures. Self is an expert at capturing the Black female form and resisting the Western gaze that denies Black women agency over their self-representation. Another source of inspiration is Rachel Jones (also a graduate of GSA), with her rhythmically gestural paintings that map out internal, psychological landscapes. More candidly, KO also says she is enjoying watching and listening to Claudia Winkleman while in the studio and at home – "I’m watching the new season of Traitors and I love seeing her with her blocky fringe and eyeliner. She glamourises messiness… and I want to start embracing that love of the imperfect and the irregular in all aspects of my life and my work." 

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The Skinny Prize is awarded annually to an artist exhibiting in RSA’s New Contemporaries, a selection of graduates from art and architecture schools across Scotland. This year’s exhibition takes place at The Royal Scottish Academy from 30 Mar-24 Apr