Jo Melvin: Conversations Between Ourselves

Writer and Exhibition Maker Jo Melvin was one of nine women Barbara Steveni included in her project Conversations Between Ourselves. In this series of interviews, Steveni highlighted the often unacknowledged work of women supporting and administrating the Artist Placement Group and later O+I.

Jo Melvin is a writer and exhibition maker based in the UK. She is Professor in Fine Art and Feminisms at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, London and Director and Curator of the Barry Flanagan Estate. She is a writer and exhibition maker, with an interdisciplinary research methodology giving attention to practices of women by using ‘forgotten histories’ (archives, memory, oral histories) as material for new curatorial research. In particular, she utilises performative processes like an archaeology of the future to tease out relationships between the archive—its various memories and its documentation.

Exhibition making is central to her practice. Recent projects include Speak Out, Out there, an exhibition with Jeff Gibbons at The House Dublin (2023), Jeffrey Bligh meets David Thorp once again Filet Space, London UK (2023), Pataphysics and Play at Kasmin Gallery (2023), Imaginary Solutions at Galerie Max Hetzler (2023), Barry Flanagan: Process, Method, and Myth, Salons d’art Palexpo, Art Gèneve (2023), Lucy Heyward: Thoughts that Smell Like Memories at Handel Street Projects (2022), Pauline Julier: Wind Light Image at Laure Genillard Gallery (2022), The Feuilleton I will bear witness: Piggy-backing from the Edicola, Spoleto, Umbria and MACRO, Roma, Italy (2021), Imagine Being Here Now with Lucy R. Lippard and Askeaton Contemporary, (2021), Barry Flanagan, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019) and Publication Scaffold, Dublin (2019). Recent publications include A series of mediations and provocations in Anne-James Chaton I have the solution for the planet (Daisy Editions, 2022), Aesthetics of Silence, Picturing the Invisible, UCL (2022); Sophie Bouvier-Ausländer, An Archaeology of the Future Lausanne and London, (2021), and Between the Eyes Painting. Gene Beery: Para-Visual Painter of Word Signs, FriArt, Fribourg Switzerland (2019). In 2018 Melvin started collaborating with Vittoria Bonifati to form a series of exhibitions, publications and events at Villa Lontana, Rome. She is currently working on the concept film Dr Solsternus drawing from a Byzantine mosaic on the facade of Spoleto Cathedral, Italy, co-produced with Wendy Short, exploring intersections and stratifications of voice, history, and landscape.

Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself is at Modern Art Oxford until 8 June 2025.