Joanna Lock

Member

Joanna’s practice of “collecting silences” is informed by instances of the unspoken and the unheard in film and literature. Her recent artworks and research have highlighted the silences that surround excluded and suppressed bodies in institutions ranging from museums to families. She has developed a variety of artistic strategies for materialising and giving voice to the hidden presence of these “wrong” bodies, and making manifest the silenced stories that surround them. Between 2018 and 2020, Joanna worked extensively with Bergen Natural History Museum, creating permanent installations, spoken-word performances, sound works, lectures, artist’s books and listening experiences, which materialised, spatialised and shared stories about the complex, covert relationships between the museum and the wrong bodies of the pests which cohabit the institution with its collection of specimens. Joanna’s work has also made use of autofiction, drawing on her own experience of familial silences as the basis for writing and performance. Joanna’s writing about her artistic research practice has been inlcuded such publications as Labelle 2022, Ecologies of Attention and conferences such as The 7th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts, 2021, at UniArts, Helsinki.Image-making remains important to Joanna’s practice. Her photographic work has been widely exhibited and is held in the collections of George Eastman House, NY and The V&A London.

Between 2016 and 2020 Joanna was a Research Fellow with Institutt Samtidskunst, Bergen, Norway. Recent exhibitions and events have included, Orchard Park, a solo exhibition at The Ferens Gallery, Hull (2023 – 2024). In 2022, Joanna participated in the Art Angel curated World Weather Network, working with artists from Aotearoa and Australia. In 2020, with actor Idun Vik, Joanna performed her work Between Our Words I Will Trace Your Presence, at the Borealis Festival in Norway for a live audience and simulatneous radio broadcast. In 2019, collaborating with members of the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories, Joanna performed her research in the UN Buffer-Zone, Cyprus, at Nicosia’s Buffer Fringe Festival. In 2019, she made It’s Only When I Rest… an interactive installation using compressed-air and mechanical, medical ventilators, for HKS, Norway. In 2018 Joanna was commissioned by Stay Hungry to make work for Lausitzer Platz, Berlin. Between 2013 and 2017 Joanna collaborated with Historic Environment Scotland staff, on artistic-research appearing for example in Neate & Craggs, 2016, Modern Futures. Joanna is currently course leader for BA Fine Art, at De Montfort University.