Bursting onto Scotland’s art scene fresh out of her Painting And Printmaking degree at Glasgow School Of Art, Josie KO’s sculptures are unmistakable in scale and style. Combining a self-declared ‘unrefined’ aesthetic with humour and gothic undertones, KO interrogates the duality of being Black and Scottish, a major provocation for her since relocating from London and making Scotland home. She spends a lot of time daydreaming and probing the gaps in Black Scottish histories to conjure up imaginary stories which lurk in-between, turning them into sculptural portraits of make-believe characters who become ‘like family’ to her. 

Since the Alternative Degree Show in 2021, which saw a graduate-led programme of exhibitions in Glasgow, KO’s creative output has been immense. This year alone, her larger-than-life sculptures took centre stage in Edinburgh at the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries show and Fruitmarket’s Poor Things exhibition. With her rising cultural popularity in Scotland, she was awarded the Bothy Project’s Visual Arts Scotland Residency to explore the first suspected presence of Blackness in Scotland. 

Before heading to Eigg for the week-long residency in September, an overwhelming anxiety overcame KO. Accustomed to the busy suburbs of London and noisy vibrancy of Glasgow, this trip marked the first time she’d lived off-grid. The bothy, which could be swallowed whole by some of KO’s sculptures, is set against a steep escarpment overlooking a string of snow-dipped mountains on the nearby island of Rum. She jokes that she was half-expecting to emerge as a ‘crazy woman . . . with a beard and a walking stick!’ So, she cheated a little bit, sharing the first few days with fellow artist and friend, Emma McAndrew D’Souza. This balance still allowed KO to address her discomfort with aloneness, which she purposefully enhanced through her residency reading material: Arrangements In Blue by Amy Key, a memoir which uses Joni Mitchell’s album Blue as a cipher for finding fulfilment as an eternally single person. 

The colour blue is integral to KO’s artistic practice. ‘I found a line about “fir gorma” in the book Staying Power: The History Of Black People In Britain and my imagination ran wild,’ says KO when asked about the focus of her residency. She explains that ‘fir gorma’ translates as ‘blue men’ and originates from an Irish precolonial account of the first suspected presence of Blackness in Scotland (in the Inner Hebrides, no less). Historians understood that this blueness of the visual descriptor was comparable to the shimmering hues of a raven’s feather, hence why it has been associated with Black identity. 

While she speaks confidently about the mythology surrounding fir gorma, she clarifies that she is not a historian and feels greatly liberated by this. Instead, this one line gave KO ‘a grounding in which I’m allowed to dream of Blackness in Scotland’. The residency’s transfixing setting granted her time to speculate about who might have traced the land before her. Eventually, this fir gorma-stimulated daydreaming will be translated into new works for a duo exhibition with Kialy Tihngang next year. Collaboratively, they’ll present an imagined ‘fir gorma material culture’ which takes a rich piece of Black Scottish cultural history into uncharted territory.

KO sees archives as sites of speculation and is interested in freeing materials from the imposition of ‘westernised ideals’. As she looks ahead at the task of fictionalising an archival account of fir gorma through sculpture, KO looks back to her past experience of working with the David Livingstone Birthplace museum in Blantyre as part of an exchange group. Livingstone, who was an anti-slavery campaigner in the 19th century, left behind an archive of objects accumulated from his travels, many of which tell stories about his African crews. KO’s colleague of East African heritage, who she fondly calls Auntie Jennifer, took one look at an object in the archive which was catalogued as a fruit bowl. Auntie Jennifer turned it upside down and it was transformed into a different object. ‘It just showed that while they’ve done all that research, a lived experience is much more valuable than imposing westernised ideals onto it,’ KO asserts. ‘It does make you think about how much in the archive is true.’ We conclude that archives should therefore always be open access and new interpretations of catalogued and uncatalogued objects should be encouraged.   

Motivated by elevating neglected narratives, KO’s sculptural characters were born out of a frustration with the discipline she technically graduated in: painting and printmaking. As a student, she once scribbled a note in her sketchpad while staring at a portrait in a gallery: ‘I’m really frustrated that I only see one side of this woman. I want to see what she looks like at the back and at the sides.’ From that point, she turned to sculptures which invite onlookers to get daringly close and experience every angle. There is a palpable, familial-like bond between KO and her creations. If you haven’t had a chance to experience the vastness of her sculptures yet, there will be plenty of opportunities in 2024, including her first solo show at Govan Project Space in April. KO is an artist with a contagious level of self-discipline and vision, and her Bothy Project residency offered a rare chance to decompress ahead of a promising horizon full of exhibition opportunities.

Josie KO's art is at @josieko_art on Instagram; find out more about Bothy Project.