Thanks to the insightful and conscious, but at the same time poetic and idealistic, historical understanding of the role of women in modern Venice, Jo Cope has been able to enhance the meaning and form of a humble Venetian slipper (the traditional furlana, now fashionable all over the world ) transforming it into a symbol of women’s emancipation and cooperation for the women of yesterday and today.
Francesca Giubilei & Luca Berta Founders and curators of Venice Design Biennial
Jo creates extraordinary and beautiful pieces that are a striking fusion of art, fashion, and social comment. Jo joined our stellar line up of amazing dyslexics whose portraits featured in our INSIDE OUT people’s art project Dyslexia: Beautiful Minds at the Design Museum in London.
Kate Power & Kathy Forsyth Amazing Dyslexics, authors, advocates & curators
I have worked on a series of projects with Jo over the past decade and her practice as an artist has grown and developed in the most unexpected and exciting ways. She now has a laser-like focus on histories and methods of shoemaking. She relentlessly explores the ways in which this can be deployed through her sculptural, performance and film work. This approach has given us rich and highly coherent body of work that is both aesthetically lush and a profound reflection on our emotional and religious lives. Cope has created her extraordinary oeuvre with the skills and tools of the most humble of trades, the cobbler.
Hugo Worthy Curator of Leicester Gallery
I find Jo Cope’s work very interesting because it is a perfect connection between art and design. her conceptual and layered work is what I am hoping for as a curator. Jo’s work makes you look twice because there is much more things going on than a pair of wearable shoes!
Liza Snook, Founder of the Virtual Shoe Museum
When news of fresh work by Jo Cope emerges, I become aware, without exception, of a personal anticipatory buzz…a sense of exhilaration! With some certainty I await her exceptional concepts, in combination with the accompanying challenges that inevitably, are likely to accompany her next piece. From the start of her practice, the quality of Jo’s superb crafting and multifaceted themes were easily recognisable and have become synonymous with her work; deliberate, provocative and over time, increasingly political. Occasionally, the work has the potential to shock.
Maggie Weller, Leicester