Jo Chapman & Molly Thomson: Chance Encounters

Chance Encounters brings together Jo Chapman and Molly Thomson, two artists whose works reveal the intelligence of making in very different ways.

After twenty years of creating large-scale public artworks, Jo fell in love with clay, renewing her connection with the physical, instinctive and spontaneous pleasures of making by hand. Her works in Chance Encounters bear the hallmarks of her wider practice: bold, decisive forms thrumming with the rhythms of nature and natural systems. Here, those forms take on a human scale, their surfaces and contours bearing the irregularities of her newfound medium.

At first glance, Molly's constructions appear precise and mathematical, their rectilinear geometry offering a sharp contrast to Chapman's organic forms. Look more closely, however, and chance emerges as a defining vector: the possibilities and limitations of her chosen materials and tools (plywood, acrylic paint and a bandsaw) shape the work as it develops. Molly's constructions embody her responses to questions that often arise during making, such as how to subvert expectations of how a material will behave. Each work accumulates through a zigzagging sequence of decisions, discoveries and revisions, sometimes over long periods, so her artworks are never entirely settled. Each piece in the exhibition is a snapshot of her ongoing investigation into form, process and materiality.