Johanna Gibbons is a Landscape Architect, Royal Designer of Industry, Fellow of The Landscape Institute. She is Founding Partner of award-winning Landscape Architectural practice J&L Gibbons and social enterprise Landscape Learn.
Jo’s practice is renowned for its innovative and holistic design process, driven by a desire to safeguard the deep ecologies that shape the character of a place. The practice portfolio is characterised by a scrupulous understanding of both natural processes and community networks. As a founding signatory of UK Landscape Architects Declare Climate & Biodiversity Emergency, J&L Gibbons is focused on its environmental and social responsibilities, championing landscape architecture with urgency, as a critical discipline in shaping a more resilient, healthy and uplifting future.
Jo sits on various advisory panels for Historic England, The Forestry Commission and The World Forum on Urban Forests. She lectures widely and her most recent publication is ‘Conversations on Urban Forestry’. Her practice is cross disciplinary and collaborative, ERDE being representative of her open approach to both practice and research.
Kate studied at Edinburgh College of Art between 1980 and 1984. She lives and works in London. Her work is internationally known through exhibitions, public architectural installations and commissions. She is a passionate materialist and colourist. Her work is dynamic: concerning itself with interactions, movement and forces - process left visible.
The work has a sensual capacity. It is an invitation to engage - to express use and agency - animated by happenings, human interactions and relationships. She has a close reference to both architectural space and and material action, making her work robust, tactile and active. In doing so, Kate challenges the idea that the art work and the viewer should be separated.
Her work looks to highlight the inherent beautiful, unpredictible and uncontrollable character of natural materials - with reference to both her working medium, charcoal with watercolour, and her subject matter, rock.
“These pauses in the action bring a temporarily sculptural nature to the continuum of effort and mess, and draw attention to Kate’s close conversation with materials, so we experience both her action on them and their action on each other, making visible the push-me-pull-you of process”
Sarah Griffin Artist House, New Art Centre, 2018.
Her work currenly sits in the Public Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Craft Council, The Contemporary Arts Society, NHSTrust, as well as the FCA. She was awarded Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts in 2015 and is, at present, a visiting lecturer in Mixed Media at the Royal College of Art in London.
JO GIBBONS & KATE BLEE