Jo Dennis Writes to New York: Ruins, Memory, and Maternal Inheritance at CARVALHO
New York receives Jo Dennis with a body of work that feels at once intimate and infrastructural. A Letter to My Daughter, now on view at CARVALHO through January 3, 2026, marks the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in the city—and it arrives with the quiet authority of objects that have already lived full lives elsewhere.
Dennis’s sculptural assemblages are constructed from found, weathered materials—most notably military tents sourced from the North of England—that carry with them the residue of use, climate, and abandonment. These materials are not neutral supports; they are collaborators. Washed, painted, stretched, and reassembled into tent-like, semi-domestic forms, they become stand-ins for bodies and shelters alike. In New York, a city perpetually negotiating precarity and endurance, the works read as meditations on ageing, labor, and resilience, particularly as they relate to women navigating political, social, and emotional collapse.
The sculptures hover between ruin and refuge. Their draped surfaces recall Renaissance painting, yet the remnants of function—zips, buckles, rivets, toggles—remain exposed at the edges, refusing aesthetic erasure. As Rebecca Birrell, PhD, writes in her accompanying essay, these details operate as “an abstract visual language of their own,” marking where an object was once entered, folded, or secured. The result is a series of structures that feel like dens: provisional sanctuaries that suggest care and protection, even as fabric sags against wooden and metal spokes with a sense of elegant dilapidation.
At CARVALHO, Dennis’s work resonates with the city’s architectural memory—buildings repurposed, lives layered, histories partially visible. The exhibition’s title, A Letter to My Daughter, frames the work as an act of transmission: a record of what survives, what fails, and what is still worth passing on. These are not monuments; they are tender instructions for living with collapse rather than denying it.
Dennis (b. 1973, Forres, Scotland) brings more than two decades of multidisciplinary practice to this moment. Based in London, she works across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, and is known for her commitment to artist-led initiatives, including Pigeon Park, Peckham 24 Photo Festival, AMP Gallery, and Asylum Chapel. Her recent and forthcoming projects position her squarely within an international conversation—she is currently featured in The Long Now, celebrating forty years of the Saatchi Gallery, with an upcoming solo exhibition at Belenius Gallery in Stockholm in 2026.
For those encountering Dennis’s work in New York and wanting to trace its trajectory beyond the city, Mexico City offers a compelling parallel chapter. Earlier this year, Dennis presented A Glass of Absinth at JO-HS in the Roma Norte neighborhood—a show that unfolded against the city’s dense palimpsest of colonial architecture, modernist interventions, and everyday improvisation. Experiencing her work there felt like a travelogue written in materials: the tents and assemblages conversing with Mexico City’s own logic of survival, where domestic space often spills into the street and history is visibly patched rather than polished. Visiting JO-HS Mexico becomes less a detour than an extension of the story New York is now reading—one that situates Dennis’s practice within a broader geography of care, decay, and reinvention.
Back in NYC, A Letter to My Daughter stands as both an arrival and an offering. It asks viewers to slow down, to read materials the way one reads letters—for tone, for omission, for what is carried between the lines. Available works may be requested through the gallery.
