Jo Margolis’s work alternates between carving stone or wood and drawing with a technical pen: “I believe there is some connection between my having chosen to make 3D forms out of hard materials and to draw using a fine steel point instead of shaping soft clay and using a fine brush.” She works with texture and patterns. She writes: “I use the marks and lines in the most parsimonious way, as would nature: as nothing is random, nothing is wasted. All suggest more ways to be even more sensitive, not knowing where this will lead. The purpose behind all of this markmaking, the shapes, forms and textures, is to celebrate the efforts we make to understand, to document and to enrich our world. Pattern, space, and shape are the letters, the verbs and the nouns of my visual world.”

Margolis’s work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Palmer Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Her work is in private collections in Abu Dhabi, France, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Switzerland, Texas, and Virginia. She was born Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and she lives and works in Wellsville, Pennsylvania.

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