Jo Grogan’s sculptural practice explores the intersection of ornament, labour, and material memory, interrogating hierarchies embedded within decorative traditions. Working through the history of woodcarving, she positions craft as a contested site where value, taste, and permanence are produced and destabilised. Her process foregrounds the embodied nature of making, with carved surfaces acting as registers of labour and inherited knowledge. Informed by her Liverpool upbringing and background in fashion, she approaches ornament as a performative language that both reveals and conceals tension. Suspended between refinement and collapse, her works reframe ornament as a critical structure through which histories are continually re-authored.

She is currently a UK Associate Artist-in-Residence at the Delfina Foundation and an artist-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation. She graduated with First-Class Honours in Historic Woodcarving & Gilding from City & Guilds of London Art School (2023).

Recent exhibitions include Inflorescence at the Saatchi Gallery (2026), The Weight of Turning at the Sarabande Foundation (2026), Collect Art Fair (2026), and Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture at the Saatchi Gallery (2025). A QEST Scholar, she has received the Wood Award and the Grinling Gibbons Emerging Carvers Award, with coverage in The Times, Harper’s Bazaar, BBC, and Sky Arts.