Chance Encounters brings together Jo Chapman and Molly Thomson, two artists whose works reveal the intelligence of making in very different ways.

After twenty years of creating large-scale public artworks, Jo fell in love with clay, renewing her connection with the physical, instinctive and spontaneous pleasures of making by hand.

Her works in Chance Encounters bear the hallmarks of her wider practice: bold, decisive forms thrumming with the rhythms of nature and natural systems.

Here, those forms take on a human scale, their surfaces and contours bearing the irregularities of her newfound medium.

At first glance, Molly’s constructions appear precise and mathematical, their rectilinear geometry offering a sharp contrast to Chapman’s organic forms.

Look more closely, however, and chance emerges as a defining vector: the possibilities and limitations of her chosen materials and tools – plywood, acrylic paint and a bandsaw – shape the work as it develops.

Molly’s constructions embody her responses to questions that often arise during making. For example, how do I subvert expectations of how this material will behave?

Each work accumulates through a zigzagging sequence of decisions, discoveries and revisions, sometimes over long periods. Her artworks are therefore never entirely settled.

Each piece in the exhibition, therefore, is a snapshot of her ongoing investigation into form, process and materiality.

About Jo Chapman

Jo Chapman is a UK-based site-specific artist whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, installation and ceramics.

With over 25 years’ experience, she has delivered major public art commissions across the UK and internationally, including in France, India, Iceland and Ireland, moving between the boundaries of sculpture, drawing and architecture.

She has exhibited at venues including the London Art Fair and Kettle’s Yard, undertaken residencies at Wysing Arts Centre, Firstsite and the Fish Factory in Iceland, and shown at the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire in France and at the Chelsea Flower Show.

About Molly Thomson

Molly Thomson is a painter who lives and works in Norfolk, near Norwich. She was born in Perth, Scotland, studied fine art and sculpture at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, and took an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London, where she received the John Minton Award.

She taught at Falmouth, Oxford’s Ruskin School, Cleveland Institute of Art and Norwich University of the Arts, and co-edited Journal of Contemporary Painting’s “Commitment in Painting” issue.

She shows regularly with Contemporary British Painting and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and in Japan, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, France and Australia.