The Score Paintings belong to a new series begun in Iceland in June 2026, where shifting light and expansive horizons offered a point of departure. Each painting begins with an intuitively drawn grid, creating a subtle relief across the paper. Light catches the incised lines, revealing the relationship between the seemingly flat and the carved, and bringing variations in tone and perception into view. The grid both divides and creates space, generating a sense of expanse and volume within the intimate scale of the work. Colour is built through juxtaposition and restraint, using the transparency and layering of watercolour. As painted layers meet, their edges generate variations in tone, density and transparency. Small differences in colour resonate, while variations in alignment and interval leave room for chance and the unexpected harmonies that emerge as one colour meets another. These paintings reward close looking. Their apparent simplicity gives way to a quiet optical vitality, in which light, colour and material remain in continuous interplay.

Jo Lewis’ work is rooted in movement and stasis, spanning works on paper, leporello books and wall-hung sculptures. It explores flux, the fragility of the moment, the interplay between dynamism and endurance, and the void as a generative and active stillness. In Taoism, “becoming still” is understood not as a noun but as a verb; in the artist’s practice, stillness emerges through the physical materiality of making. Ink and watercolour are the primary materials: ancient, humble and highly responsive. Paper may be folded, scored, laid flat or layered, offering surface and structure for the fluidity of pigment. The unpredictability of watercolour is embraced, allowing each work to evolve through its own making. Colour and transparency play a central role, as do the subtle relationships that emerge at edges, overlaps or underlays. Seeing is never static; it is a sequence of fragmentary glimpses. Whether encountered in the intimate Land or Score series or while moving before a sculptural painting or leporello book, each work invites an intimacy of perception, offering new revelations with every shift in perspective.

Jo Lewis is a London-based artist working in ink and watercolour on paper. She studied at Leith School of Art, Edinburgh, and the École des Beaux-Arts, Valence, France. Recent solo exhibitions include La Galerie Papiers d’Art, Paris, Galerie Valérie Eymeric, Lyon, and Vivienne Roberts Projects, London (online). Her work has been shown at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and collected by institutions including Hermès, the Royal College of Music and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In June 2026, she was invited by the Baer Arts Foundation to make new work in northern Iceland.