Jo Galvin-Martinengo
Jo Galvin-Martinengo (b. 1984) is an Auckland based Artist with a BFA from Whitecilffe College of Arts and Design (2006). Historically her discipline has concentrated on analogue photography practices, capturing diaristic snapshots and intimate portraiture, land and cityscapes. Her creative practice has also included self initiated and artist led curation of interactive art shows and parties, as well as moving image and performance.
Favouring to work across mediums in whatever material suits the journey, whilst pregnant with her daughter Coco (b. 2015) she turned her hands to clay, and over the last decade this has been her pull. With curious consideration of how far she can take the properties of clay, her intuitively created organic forms result in pieces that function as stand-alone artworks and groupings of small scale installations. Her sculpture, jewellery and domestic-ware feature naked surfaces to illustrations and stories within stories as well as the application of both subtle and dramatic glaze chemistry.
Due to the nature of the rare neurogenetic developmental disorder (Angelman Syndrome) that Coco was born with, as well as her own neurodivergence and life with hEDS, Jo's practice ebbs and flows from prolific output to months of studio stillness. In times of flare up, or where the support needs of her child require intensive energy output, research and less messy mediums such as writing and textiles become her go-to.
In reviving her practice in the Mud Studios residency (May-October 2025), Jo realises the importance of remaining flexible in her process and leans in to pushing the properties of porcelain and experimental glazes, considering how the introduction of textiles affects the sculptures’ relationship to one another to exist in their own scape. With an underlying sense of humour, she approaches her making with a delicate and playful curiosity, exploring connection, the subconscious, memory and the unreliable narrator, bridging the tension of an emergent theme-heavy dialog informed by lived experience and study of the nervous system, cell biology, magic, medicine and mythology.
