The Secret Life of Objects and String
Ball's work is motionless, taught, suspended and alert, as if someone just left the room to get another bolt or box and a complex activity will resume forthwith. It isn't clear exactly what type of activity might resume but this hardly matters. There is an industriousness about the work that is tangible and seductive. So much more so because it inhabits the rare position of industriousness divorced from use value. It is not what is being (or might be) produced here that matters necessarily; it is the means and measure of the activity of non-mechanized making.
What is evident is a tremendous amount of labor, and by extension, the act of laboring that is also, and importantly, an act of thinking. Though the show is devoid of a body per say, there is an acute sense of careful, busy hands, and an exacting and reasonable head. Both hands and head are engaged in doing and in meticulous thinking as evidenced by the built quality and quirky, evasive logics of the work. What delights me is that there seems to be no division between the thinking and the physical making; they happen simultaneously and are completely interdependent. Yet this is not exactly intuitive work. What makes it so much more interesting is that as we walk among the objects, we are engaged by a system of signs and sequences that demonstrate their own sound (if obtuse) logics. And while I may not entirely comprehend the narrative, I am completely convinced.
With Ball's work we are in the company of reason that defies conventional processes and prescribed outcomes. For a moment, consumer culture and the tyranny of mass production is turned on its head. It is the profound and rare sense of care, and careful, physical and cerebral industry that moves me. Ball's work is a mapping of physicalized gestures not towards the production of objects, but from objects, as they spin beyond themselves inventing their own uses, their own stories, their own universe.
Yedda Morrison, Summer 2008
An essay on Jo Ball´s exhibition ‘Twilight Point’ at the Parisian Laundry, Montréal.