Biography

Mark Woods (b. 1961, Surrey) is a British artist with a background in contemporary jewellery production and in boat building, he produces highly elaborate artefacts that blur the boundaries between jewellery, fine art, fetish objects and items from a cabinet of curiosities.

“Mark Woods’ highly glamorous and «transgressive» objects are beautiful fetishes, reminiscent of sadomasochist sex toys, but their softness, delicacy and beauty surpass any remote functionality. While packed with feminist, masculine, sexual and even religious ideas, the attractiveness of their execution and the nobility of the materials immediately capture the viewers’ senses. Woods’ sculptures seem to echo to perfection the fraudulent simulation phenomena of a society increasingly obsessed with glamour and pornography – a super-profitable industry ultimately responsible for the supply of new concepts, images and fantasies of our private sexual lives. It is certainly ironic, for a society always looking for new excitement and extreme pleasures, that the more we search for transgression the more we turn into play-acting.”

– Mónica Sánchez-Argilés