In Formula + Fetish, the first comprehensive monograph devoted to British artist Mark Woods, readers are drawn into a world where the decorative and the disturbing walk in lockstep. Published to coincide with Wood’s rising prominence beyond the niche spheres of contemporary jewellery and fetish culture, the volume traces four decades of work that refuses categorisation.
Woods, born in Surrey in 1961, emerged in the late 1980s as an enfant terrible of adornment. Designing jewellery for Electrum Gallery in South Molton Street, he quickly attracted attention from the intersecting worlds of art, fashion, and performance. Yet what began as jewellery soon outgrew its body-bound origins.
Throughout the 1990s, particularly in Hackney and Shoreditch’s then-peripheral creative underworlds, Woods cultivated a sculptural language that was at once decadent and unnerving—objects that initially appeared Victorian but, upon closer inspection, revealed surgical, fetishistic, or devotional undercurrents.
The book—structured around four thematic strands: Objects, Staged Self-Portraits, Creative Images, and Jewellery—positions Woods not as a maker of accessories but as an artist fundamentally preoccupied with desire. His work is situated somewhere between reliquary and restraint devices, drawing on materials and forms that evoke ecclesiastical pomp, medical precision, and BDSM pageantry in equal measure.
Photography plays a central role in the book’s presentation. Full-colour spreads document both standalone objects and the staged installations and photographic tableaux in which Woods embeds them. His Staged Self-Portraits section reveals the artist as both auteur and subject, adopting personae that variously allude to martyrdom, drag, ritual, and erotic roleplay. These performative self-images are not simply vanity projects but formal investigations into identity as something mutable, fractured, and deeply aestheticised.
Critical essays by Paul Carey-Kent, Michael Petry, and Peter Suchin lend further texture to the book, offering overlapping yet distinct readings of Woods’s oeuvre. Carey-Kent considers Woods’s practice as a challenge to the distinctions between object and ornament, while Petry foregrounds the sensuality of the work and its implicit social codes. Suchin takes a more psychoanalytic route, reading the works as fragments of desire caught between repression and excess. The decision to let these voices diverge, rather than forcing a consensus, serves the work well, emphasising its ambiguity and refusal to settle.
Yet it would be a mistake to regard Formula + Fetish as simply an exploration of kink aesthetics. Beneath the seductive surfaces and theatrical modes lies an unflinching attention to craft. Woods’s background in boat building and jewellery design is evident in every filigreed joint and every lacquered finish. This is not camp bricolage but meticulously constructed, slow-made work. It is also profoundly autobiographical, grounded in the artist’s lifelong negotiation between beauty, violence, and the rituals of self-construction.
Now based in Cumbria, where he co-directs Cross Lane Projects with painter and partner Rebecca Scott, Woods continues to mine the tensions between elegance and unease. Formula + Fetish is not just a catalogue of his achievements but a manifesto in material form—an invitation to look longer and feel more deeply than one might expect. – PCR