GUEST ARTIST: JO PEARL

In April 2025 we had the pleasure to host a talk with multi-disciplinary artist Jo Pearl! Jo walked us through her unique career path and how she came about to work with clay and stop motion to create work that is both playful and politically engaged.

Like many of us, and many of guest speakers, Jo had an initial career before discovering clay. She worked in PR for many years before going back to university to study Ceramic Desgin at Central Saint Martins and launch her hybrid practice combining clay and stop-frame animations. Since graduating in 2019, Jo has developed various income strands from portrait and exhibition commissions, clay public engagement workshops to open up conversations in the public domain using clay, to ‘clayscribing’ – a new genre of visual annotation of business meetings, live-sculpted in raw clay. Jo’s work has been shown internationally, and in various UK campaigning exhibitions at London City Hall, Norwich Cathedral, a solo show in the home of Charles Darwin and On Air, a group show about air pollution which she co-curated for Ceramic Art London 2022. Her stop motion films have won several awards including the People’s Vote for the Best Short Film at the 2023 International Ceramics Festival in Aberystwyth, and shortlisted for Earthphoto 2024, exhibiting at the Royal Geographical Society. 

This year, her sculptural work was on display in Somerset House’s landmark exhibition SOIL: The World at Our Feet. The exhibition featured the work of 40 artists, and communicated through films, objects, research projects and other installations, the importance of soil, its unbreakable bond with life and its vital role it plays in our planet’s future.  Jo’s “Unearthed Mycelium” piece was featured on the poster. This sculpted ceramic frieze, represents a slice through topsoil revealing plants and fungi above ground and their connected roots and mycelium strands below – an entanglement of life, symbiotically conjoined. Jo had also created “Oddkin”, her largest ceramic installation to date. It celebrates the microscopic companion species hidden in soil’s biome beneath our feet! Afterall, a cup of healthy soil contains around 200 billion bacteria, 20 million protozoa, 100,000 nematodes, 100,000 meters of fungi and probably one earthworm. “Oddkin” appeared like a constellation of dancing micro-organisms. It 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. As Jo says: “Soil has a PR problem. We can’t cherish what we don’t know. So if we are to save our soil we must take a much closer look at what is often dismissed as ‘dirt’ and realise that our lives depend on its aliveness.”

Jo describes her practice as a celebration of the materiality of clay and its diverse states of being. She brings clay to life by sculpting the material, photographing each iteration of constantly evolving form, and sometimes firing the final state. As a result, she not only creates a sculpture that embodies all of the process, but also creates all the shots needed to weave a narrative into a stop-motion film. With this approach, Jo produces two works of art - the ceramic and the film - simultaneously while consciously minimising material use and kiln firings. The use of film also allows her to transcend the stillness of ceramics and magically bring life to her piece. By combining claymation and ceramics Jo can explore notions of the fleeting and the timeless, agency and alchemy. 

Jo’s work is also politically engaged, concerned with existential problems facing humanity: air pollution’s impact on health, modern slavery, emotional illiteracy in a digital world, the biodiversity of healthy soil. These themes have always been important to Jo, even prior to starting her clay/stopmotion practice. When she first started to bring notion of air pollution or climate crisis into her work, she explained that the initial reactions from viewers were somehow a bit sad or disengaged… She then made a conscious decision to create work that is approachable and playful, while not shying away from the important issues that we are currently facing. Her work is both sensitive and playful. There’s humour, provocation - and above all, delight!

Learn more about her work and stay informed with upcoming events:

https://jopearl.com/

https://www.instagram.com/jopearlceramics/