An art exhibition by Jo Case exploring romantic dependency and self-definition
Accidentally Saying Love You at the End of a Phone Call to Your Boss brings together five years of work by multidisciplinary artist Jo Case.
Working across textiles, knitting, painting and using found materials, Jo constructs an intensely personal visual language where humour and discomfort exist side by side. Bright colours, repetitive patterns, and hand-worked surfaces draw on the familiar aesthetics of childhood while unsettling them through awkwardness and longing.
The exhibition explores the ways we search for ourselves through other people: attachment, dependency, projection, and the quiet negotiations involved as we navigate the world essentially alone, whilst trying to romantically integrate with other humans. Much of the work is made instinctively. Paintings are created using the artist's non-dominant hand, embracing uncertainty over control, while knitted textiles become both image and object, carrying traces of time, repetition and care. Rather than illustrating specific experiences, the works function as emotional landscapes where vulnerability, absurdity, and tenderness coexist.
Although spanning different materials, each piece forms part of an ongoing conversation about identity: how it is inherited, constructed, lost, and gradually reclaimed. Humour becomes a means of survival as much as expression, allowing difficult emotional states to be approached with generosity rather than certainty and an instinctual resistance.
These works have largely remained unseen while being developed over the past five or so years. As Jo prepares to begin formal art education this autumn, aged thirty-nine, Accidentally Saying Love You at the End of a Phone Call to Your Boss presents the culmination of a decade of independent practice alongside a period of rebuilding emotionally, and the artist welcomes you to her first solo show and the beginning of a new chapter.
About Jo:
Jo has been working with textiles for the last 3 years and practicing as a multidisciplinary artist and designer since 2010.
She began designing and making clothes obsessively as a child, they were bright and loud, and hideous even for 1995. Her work remains largely unseen and this is her first solo art show and the first time her work has been shown in a gallery.
Contact: If you have any questions regarding this exhibition, please email programming@stmargaretshouse.org.uk
Venue: The Chapel at St Margaret’s House, 21 Old Ford Road — E2 9PL
Access: We are working to make our Grade II listed building more accessible, but it will take some time. Please note that entry to the Chapel is not step-free. If you require access support (including our portable ramps) and/or access to an accessible toilet, please contact us on 020 8980 2092 or email programming@stmargaretshouse.org.uk so we can arrange this for you.
Opening Event: Friday 4th September, 6.30-8.30pm
Exhibition: Saturday 5th September 10am-4pm
Tickets for the Opening Event are free, but registration is essential