Josie KO is a Glasgow based artist who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2021. Since then she has been working as a committee member at Transmission Gallery, been working full time at Glasgow School of Art’s student’s association and has exhibited in Dundee, London and Switzerland.
Bringing together a kitsch DIY aesthetic full of colour and humour with dark gothic undertones, her work playfully presents narratives which speak towards the Black British experience and histories in a white dominated environment.
In this work, titled Monuments, the artist reflects on Black Scottish histories and her own experience of moving to Scotland. Motivated by the conversations regarding monuments in Britain after the Black Lives Protests in 2020, Josie KO decided to take autonomy and respond by recreating what she believed a British monument should be. Instead of creating a monument that glorified and upheld racist figures, her monument elevated the Black female figure. Decorated in bold and vibrant colours, textural surfaces and exaggerated expressions, she rewards the Black female with the same status received by white male figures in British histories and shines a light on the erasure of Significant Black British figures in our past.
