Biography
Jo Guile is a multidisciplinary sculptor whose practice is rooted in the alchemical and symbolic properties of glass, its optical complexity, its capacity to reflect and reveal, and its vital yet often invisible role in how we see and interpret the world. She engages with a material that promises clarity, underpins our technologies with certainty, yet can push us into fractured or uncentred spaces. She works at the intersection of art and science, informed by collaborations and exchanges with, among others, Earth Scientists, Ophthalmologists and Physical Chemists.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Stanislav Libenský Award (Prague, 2025–2026), Venice Glass Week (2025), and Colour Made Manifest (Pumphouse Gallery, London, 2024). In 2026, she was Highly Commended in the John Ruskin Prize. Her work has been published in Colour Made Manifest (RCA, 2025) and Colour and Poetry (UCL, 2023; 2025), and she has presented at the Society of Glass Technology Conference and UCL’s Colour and Poetry symposium. She is an associate member of the Royal College of Art’s Materially Engaged Research Cluster (MERC), and has undertaken funded research and development through projects including RGB East (with Emily Patterson), a collaborative project exploring colour through illusion across the East London landscape, developed through exhibition and participatory community engagement.
A thread that links her works is the examination of our relationship with screens and their integral relationship with glass: sometimes utilising glass’s unique relationship with light, sometimes posing the question ‘how does this align with digital technology’, particularly in the breakdown of colour, and sometimes using glass’s qualities to replicate and explore screens that occur in nature. By shifting materiality in these ways, her work can hold on to moments that are otherwise lost or unseen, opening up a virtual elsewhere as well as a virtual elsewhen.