Now that Mary Jo Bole has completed and installed Purge Incomplete she will return to another project she had put on hold; a very intricate mosaic bench of the women very close to her, such as her mother, sister and grandmother.  It is amazing to watch as she very carefully lifts, with tweezers, each snippet of tile out of a container and onto the piece.  She has worked on this project off and on for eight years but will be completing it this fall.  “A bird got in [her studio] once,” she says, “and destroyed years of work.”

     Alongside these projects Mary Jo has a rich history in ceramics, sculpture, book works, drawings and bathrooms.  Her works tend to be funerary-based.  Her artist statement at www.maryjobole.com explains what this means to her, “They represent a categorizing and re-organizing of thirty years of cemetery wanderings. They could be utilized as monuments or grave markers but they are works that merely reference death and our need to live on in some way…For me the pieces should also require some visual effort to divine their nature; they accumulate meaning through time. And lastly, several of these sculptures are about the death or absence of children. If we ‘live on’ through our children then perhaps my own impermanence is guaranteed, as I have none.”

Eastern State Penitentiary Website: http://www.easternstate.org/

Mary Jo Bole Website: http://www.maryjobole.com

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bole, Mary Jo. "MaryJoBole.com". July 25, 2009 <http://www.maryjobole.com/>.

Voorhies, James. Of Other Spaces. Columbus, Ohio: Columbus College of Art & Design, 2009.