Jodie Carey (b.1981) lives and works in London, UK. She studied at Goldsmiths College, completing an MA in sculpture at The Royal College of Art in 2007.

Jodie Carey has explored the universal human urge to make an impression on our surroundings. Through site-responsive sculptural installations, Carey’s practice adopts culturally universal, age-old artistic methods of creation, often evoking ritualistic or primitive traditions. Through revisiting these techniques, her oeuvre emphasises the relationship between object making and commemoration, whilst also looking to the physical world as a repository of material memory, silently registering the passage of time.

Referring to the soil as the skin of the earth, Carey’s interest in it as a mate- rial is born out of its essential relationship to life and simultaneous ability to embody death. Its complex constitution combines minerals, water, air and the decaying matter of once-living things. In this way, the Earthcasts continue Carey’s engagement with notions of mortality, memory and modest commemoration of every- day rituals, aligning with her previous artistic media of bone, ash and dust.

Both before and after the casting process, Carey makes her own impression on the materials of these sculptures. Beforehand, through discreet cuts and reliefs carved into the timber; afterwards, through delicate, pastel-coloured pencil shading, a recur- rent approach in Carey’s work, suggestive of primitive mark-making and the universal human urge to make an impression on our surroundings.

Institutional solo exhibitions include Sea, The Foundling Museum, UK (2018), Dark Night by Daylight, Hå gamle prestegård, Norway (2014), Shroud, Tieranatomisches Theatre Humboldt University, Germany (2013), Solomon’s Knot, New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (2012) and Somewhere, Nowhere, Pump House Gallery, UK (2011). Recent group exhibitions include Sweep – Landskip, Kinokino Kunstal, Norway (2018), The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, UK (2015), and Women to Watch 2015, The National Museum of Women in the Arts Washington in London (2015).  Carey is currently included in Parallel Lines: Sculpture and Drawing at the Royal Society of Sculptors in London, where her work is paired with Barbara Hepworth. Edel Assanti will present Carey’s monumental sculpture Cord at Frieze Sculpture 2019 in Regents Park.

selected works