Information / Contact

+44 (0) 7816 124 254
joanne@joannemasding.com
Lives and works in Birmingham, UK

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Joanne Masding is I am an artist based in Birmingham, UK.

I have a sculptural practice. I make work in clay, plastic and metal, as well as using writing and words as materials and tools for building objects. I make work to investigate the bodily experience of existing objects; how they are absorbed through fingers and technological interfaces. I use making and remaking processes to produce new versions and translations of artifacts that I can hold and interrogate with my fingers. I want to know things with my body rather than know about things in my head.

I launched my debut novel-as-artwork, Body of Pieces in 2024 (published by Bobo Books, edited by Jess Chandler), which uses the creative space of fiction to explore the nature of objects and their physical properties. Used as an extension of the studio, writing allows me to redefine the laws of physics and inhabit inaccessible artefacts. It was announced with a debut performance made for TACO!, Thamesmead.

My 2025 exhibition, The Moveable Scene of the Page (Bluecoat, Liverpool) brought writing and letterforms into the gallery. Focusing on the act of producing words with voice and hand, works were made to consider ideas of creative translation, versioning and reproduction, by outputting objects and images into new modes including texts and cross-stitch patterns.

Recent exhibitions include: Tree and Leaf, Division of Labour, Salford (2023), Copy Out a New Shoot, Modern Painters New Decorators, Loughborough (2022) (solo); My Kid Could've Done That, Holborne Museum, Bath (2021); In the Peaceful Dome, Bluecoat, Liverpool (2017-18); Touche Eclat, Workplace, Gateshead (2017); Plaster Ghost Finger Cast, The New Art Gallery, Walsall (2017) (solo); image music text, IMT Gallery, London (2016); stuffs wander off, a shape steps in, Two Queens, Leicester (2016) (solo). I have undertaken residencies with organisations including: 501 Artspace, Chongqing, China, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, Ireland, Research and Cultural Collections at University of Birmingham, Leicestershire Museums Collections. Permanent commission Flimsy Signals, made for developers Bruntwood, launched in summer 2018, and 'Make Future Village History', a public artwork for a new housing development in Cardiff, with Persimmon Homes and Studio Response launched in 2021. I was awarded a fellowship with John Feeney Charitable Trust in 2016-17 and in 2020 I received by nomination an Artist Award from Henry Moore Foundation.

I made Supporting Work (version 1), in 2022: a set of collaboratively generated ideas and encouragements to help artists maintain and develop their careers.

I launched Studio Outlet, which sells things made by artists, in late 2018.

I am co-director of Modern Clay, a co-operative ceramics studio in Birmingham.

For images from the studio, see @joannemasding on Instagram.