Ning-Hui Chung

Jo Lane is an Australian contemporary artist whose minimalist sculptures explore psychological tension and emotional weight. Using materials such as hydrostone, PVC wire, and metal, she translates the quiet pressure of thought into tangible form, balancing fragility and resilience.

LOAD (2025) combines hydrostone clusters with radiating PVC wires to visualize the burden of thought and emotion. The piece transforms psychological load into physical form—white masses suggesting memory and pressure, black filaments echoing mental overflow, held in delicate equilibrium.

Jo Lane’s practice embodies a form of “material psychology,” using contrasts of texture and structure to reveal emotional form. Her material framework unites the solidity of hydrostone with the elasticity of PVC wire, creating tension and breath within stillness—echoing Rosalind Krauss’s “expanded field” of sculpture, where objects extend beyond physicality into psychological space. Her methodology relies on reduction and restraint, transforming minimal form into a meditative exploration of thought and existence.

Her work also resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, where emotion inhabits and transforms material. In LOAD, the clustered and radiating forms visualize the “weight of thought,” bridging mind and matter through spatial rhythm and tension.

For my own sculptural practice, Lane inspires me to explore the materiality of emotion—how feeling can be embedded within proportion, texture, and spatial relationships. She teaches that artistic power can arise not from monumentality but from quiet vibration. In my miniature works, I aim to let material contrast and compositional rhythm articulate the pulse of inner psychology, allowing stillness to speak with emotional resonance.

#minimalism #psychological tension #spatial psychology #poetic structure #human condition

Image credit & website:

http://jolane.com/

https://www.instagram.com/__jolane__/

Written on: 31 August 2025