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. Designing jewellery for Electrum Gallery in South Molton Street, he quickly attracted attention from the intersecting worlds of art, fashion, and performance. What began as jewellery soon outgrew its body-bound origins.
Throughout the 1990s, while moving between Hackney and Shoreditch, Woods was already fine-tuning his sculptural voice. At a glance, some of the works exude a Victorian air. Step closer, and what surfaces is something darker, Surgical hints, fetish details.
The book revolves around four thematic strands: Objects, Staged Self-Portraits, Creative Images, and Jewellery. It positions Woods not just as a maker of accessories but as an artist fundamentally preoccupied with desire. His work is situated somewhere between reliquary and devices, drawing on materials and forms that evoke ecclesiastical pomp, medical precision, and BDSM pageantry in equal measure.
Photography plays a large part 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 are performative, revealing the artist as both author 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 aesthetic.
Essays by Paul Carey-Kent, Michael Petry, and Peter Suchin lend further weight to the book, offering overlapping writings of Woods’s practice. Carey-Kent considers Woods’s work 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, 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.
Formula + Fetish goes beyond erotic aesthetics. Beneath the seductive surfaces and theatrical modes lies an attention to craft. Woods’ background in boatbuilding and jewellery design is evident in every filigreed joint and lacquered finish. The work is meticulously constructed, in a time-laboured manner. Many of the pieces are autobiographical, grounded in the artist’s lifelong exploration of beauty, violence, and the rituals of self-construction.
Based in Cumbria, Woods 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.
