Jo Hamilton chats about her current exhibition 'Tide is High' at Timeless Textiles Gallery Sept 2025

The title of this exhibition, ‘The Tide Is High’, is a reference to the approaching tipping point of the global environmental crisis, as well the overwhelming thoughts and emotions that this can cause.

In this series of work, Jo depicts some of the ever-changing dynamics between the human-built environment and the natural world. Our structures and activities appear to dominate the natural landscape, but these works imagine instead what it might look like when nature is again allowed to reign and tips the balance back in its favour.

Houses could end up precariously balanced on eroded cliff edges, once-inhabited homes sink back into the land, buildings are submerged in the ocean and eventually engulfed by coral, even the markings of animals might adapt to reflect humans’ drastic interference in the biosphere. “It’s a world that in many places can already be seen, and one that I would not mind living, or dying in.” says Jo. 

Jo was born and grew up in Scotland. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s, she moved to Portland, where she integrated her years of drawing and painting with a handcraft learned from her Gran during her childhood.

Jo’s work weaves together these distinct languages, referencing the hand-labour of generations of women as well as contemporary culture. The process involves knotting (and unraveling) hundreds of yarns to create each work. Each knot can be seen distinctly as a second in time or may disappear into the whole, and this interplay between material and subject animates the work.
“I imagine the knotted fabric as a net filtering and transforming traditionally dominant gender roles and fine art genres. I have a number of ongoing series: soft but muscular reclining male nudes, masked women portrayed as superheroes hiding in plain sight, venerable local and historical matriarchs. and landscapes depicting the breakneck pace of the built environment. Out of concern for the natural environment, my work is primarily made from post-consumer materials”. states Jo.