JOSIE K.0.

Mekle LIPPIS

05/04/25 - 25/05/25

‘Mekle Lippis’  is a solo show by Josie KO exploring her ideas surrounding femininity, beauty, race, identity and her interest in expanding hidden archival texts

This exhibition ‘Mekle Lippis’ expands on Josie KO’s previous work ‘My Ladye with the Mekle Lippis’ (2021) which she began exploring at Glasgow School of Art. The title of the exhibition refers to Scottish poet William Dunbar’s poem ‘Of Ane Black Moir’ which describes Black women in 16th century Scotland performing for the King's court in Edinburgh. Here, Dunbar repeats the line ‘My Ladye with the Mekle Lippis’ at the end of each stanza (translating as 'My Lady with the big lips') . This captures one of the first documentations of the Black female presence in Scotland and importantly gives insight to the spectacle of the Black female body in Scotland.

Full of satire, mockery and racist observations, Prof. Bernadette Andrea argues that this poem ‘anticipates the racism of subsequent discourses of the Empire’. Using this poem as a reference, Josie aims to explore the representation of the Black female presence in white dominated spaces and consider how the vulgar descriptions of the Black women, stereotypes and racist remarks have persisted today. Significantly. Josie aims to challenge these stereotypes by empowering and the Black female body.

In this exhibition, Josie brings together her most recent works which include 'Rainbows are Portals into Utopian belongings' and 'Fir gorma' and presents her attempts to challenge how we view these ladies with the 'Mekle Lippis'. In this show Josie reveals significant Black British histories and representations of the Black female body where they are uplifted, making then the centre of attention, occupying the space and unavoidably eye-catching (countering the erasure of Black bodies in art history). 

This will be Josie KO’s first solo show outside of Scotland and will be an important step in representing her work in England.

Josie KO is an emerging Glasgow based artist who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2021. Since then, she’s been a committee member at Transmission Gallery and been Event’s Coordinator at Glasgow School of Art’s Student’s Association. Josie has since exhibited in Dundee, London, Switzerland and in Glasgow International 2024

Purposely working with non-traditional methods and mediums (such as paper mâché, glitter and found objects), Josie KO uses these materials’ relegated status in the art world and mixed media techniques to present a new reimagined depiction of the Black female body. Constructing the women with irregular limbs and glittery bodies glorifies the handmade and drifts from the norms of Western art ideals. The scale of her works makes them unavoidably noticeable, counteracting the erasure of Black women in art history and Black female artists. There is a strong sense of the artist’s self in the work, most noticeable with her casted or sculpted face, but also through the tactility of the forms, which document the signs of the artists hands and movement. Employing radical imagination, dreaming and speculation that amplifies and deepens the limitations of the archive, Josie aims to produce a richer picture of Black existence in Britain, granting a greater perspective on marginalized voices. The result are installations which show imagined world buildings and utopian longings