Jo Vickers  

After graduating from an M.A. in Fine Art Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art, Jo worked as an Exhibition Assistant at the Tate Gallery, London and Riverside Studios, London. At the same time, she established an artists collective who exhibited on public sites in London, most notably ‘Genius Loci’ in Kings Cross. Jo exhibited internationally, gaining funding to do a residency and exhibition in Stuttgart. Her film work was screened in Film festivals, such as the BP Expo, The Infanta of Castile, and Islington Business Design Centre. Her main body of work at this time was sculpture, installation, photographic and video work.

Jo began working at MMU on the Foundation course in Art and Design, as a Visiting Lecturer in the mid 1990’s and also was involved in the early days of Interactive Arts as a first year tutor. In this time she relocated to Manchester and produced many films in Manchester, including one featuring Sir Ian McKellen with The Workers Film Co-op. Jo also continued to expand her interest in artwork sited on city streets, particularly projected video imagery on to buildings and made a large scale video tryptch projected in to the windows of Manchester Cathedral, accompanied by improvisational sound piece for Digital Summer.

A central theme within Jo's work has been the quality of public and private spaces, and the role of public space for narrative story telling. This has led her to make artwork exploring urban spaces, buildings, squares, paths, and also to work with the creation of digital spaces for galleries and theatre companies. Between 1998- 2000, Jo spent time in Europe: Berlin, Bremerhaven, Randers working on an ‘Urban Towns Initiative’, filming and photographing to produce a video installation shown in Berlin and London, and a multi-faceted digital set for a European touring theatre show. Collaborative practice is important to Jo; it makes the act of creating work external, sociable, conversational, often funny, as well as it facilitating the production of large-scale work and skills sharing.

More recently Jo has been commissioned by Manchester International Arts to make large scale public installations with community involvement from perishable materials, and have made imagery from 70,000 flowers in Piccadilly Gardens and Albert Square in Manchester. Both projects were funded by the Arts Council and the North West Arts Board.

I became a Senior Lecturer in 1998 and am jointly responsible for the Fine Art area of the Foundation in Art and Design. My particular interests lie within conceptual fine art, multi-media, installation, site-specific practice, sculpture, photography, video and performance. During my time teaching at MMU, I have been involved with many public art projects