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Biography

Josephine Wood is a London-based artist working primarily in painting. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, Turps Gallery, Cross Lane Projects, Vitrine Gallery, Kingsgate Gallery, and Kunstraum Riehen, Basel, Glasgow Centre of Contemporary Art, and The Royal Academy of Art, Ghent. She has participated in numerous curated group shows alongside artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, and Valie Export, and has presented solo exhibitions in London. Recent recognitions include a Turps Residency (2024), the Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2024), and the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust Grant (2023).

Statement

My recent work is concerned with a dialogue on how bodies, particularly feminine bodies, are shaped by the spaces they inhabit and the cultural narratives, and societal expectations projected onto them. By collapsing the boundaries between figure and furniture, flesh and object, interior and exterior, the domestic ceases to be a backdrop and becomes a deeply affective, contested, and transformative space.

In this work the domestic territory becomes a site of psychological complexity and cultural inscription, where the personal is inherently political. The home serves as both a literal interpretation and symbolic field where desire, fantasy, and fragmented ideologies converge. Figures dissolve into their surroundings, entwined with furniture and everyday objects, transitioning between body, commodity and interiors.

This slippage between figure and environment draws from feminist psychoanalytic theory in regards to feminine subjectivity and sexuality, as fluid, fragmented, and resistant to containment. My figures often exist in states of rapture and/or tension, between sensation and structure, impulse and restraint—a non-fixed identity, a space of constant negotiation.

Rooted in my working class upbringing, I incorporate motifs that evoke the domestic and cultural environments of my past. Familiar interiors, vernacular objects, and symbolic tropes recur not as static references, but as charged sites of memory, emotion, and embodied experience.