Elizabeth Jackson - Portfolio of Practice

Liz Ja ck

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artist

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t n e m e t a t Using visceral language as a catalyst for intuitive making, I create compositions comprised of slipcast found objects and handbuilt gestures.

They oscillate between the familiar and the otherworldly the everyday and the abstract

the rapidly formed and the pored over Playing with techniques, texture, colour, scale and form the work invites the viewer on a journey of visual association and intrigue.

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The work is the residue of this making process and my compositions - the result of contemplative and playful arrangements that initiate conversation between the objects and the viewers who choose to look at them.

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At the heart of my process is a concern with embodied modes of knowledge production and the transformation of clay into something, rooted in knowledge that can’t quite be explained verbally but is activated within us. It is a translation of my own experience of being in the world, the things I see and feel, the clay that stains my hands and the process of learning and discovering meaning through making.

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delicately smothering prints, 2021

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If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

- The Carrier Bag of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin

I am a gatherer of things.

This is a gathering of those things in one place, of words of abstract objects of everyday objects of colours of gestures of compositions and a continually growing set of questions.

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inty a dappled pink chain a melon dirty fingernails palm prints the leaf

I gather things because they are intriguing, familiar, unfamiliar, unusual, absurd, chaotic, or simply I like the feel of them in my hand. They are a starting point for my work with clay, a way into intuitive making led by my gathering.

Such things might not make grand gestures or electrifying statements, but that doesn’t make them disposable, or incapable of holding memory, narrative or feeling.

You might just have to look that little bit closer.

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Words that I’ve gathered become a starting point, a way into intuitive making, treating clay with the sensitivity and pattern that it requires.

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d atere with w ething of som ng ball sprouti

sheltering smothered softness bursting sprouting cushion

fluidity tangled nesting

Touching clay makes it a little easier to feel the words in a bodily sense.

down

My dissertation was a contribution to the translation of making into language.

My current process begins instead by exploring the translation of language into making, and it’s possibilities. Using clay as a means of expressing that which exists firmly in the world, and those thoughts and feelings of abstraction, those which cannot easily be defined.

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My hands think and feel and respond repetitively, attempting to translate that which might not be easily translated. Though the work of my hands might not directly reflect the words used as a starting point, they are a translation of such in all their ambiguity, their gestural qualities enabling conversation with each other. The act of making holds the potential to produce new language of its own.

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And if, like Ursula Le Guin describes, gathering is what it means to be human, then I propose that to make with our hands is much the same - a tool for connection, learning and knowledge production, expressing that which is within us. Making as a manifestation of the world around me and within me.

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thoughts about being a forest blue tomato, 2021

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stily into gaps forming a spiral as my legs roc e si ushed ha k back and p des i y a l c f o forth reig mmediate blobs

gent igram il m e h t to t pigmen suring a e m rr f clay fu e sieve o th e p a cr s gniting it wi th tiny hisses and bubbling clay squelches using a pin tool to

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g n i k a m ni ng a e m & n o iti

I have a library of things, a gathering of objects, from which to choose. To build my own narrative, my own contemplation, my own evocation and for the viewer to build theirs.

I begin to formulate compositions, thinking once more about the words I have used to make the components, and influenced by the way in which they interact with one another, their colour, form, texture, moveability, and ability to hold each other’s shape.

Once formulated these compositions are inhabited by their own internal logic, waiting to be encountered and potentially understood. A momentary interaction.

An opportunity for individual meaning making.

I am merely the puppeteer who sets the stage.

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Meaning is fluid, set to change, ambiguous, it shifts like the transitory world with which we interact.

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An offering of the familiar, in conversation with the gestural, a melon foil a chainlike form transformed into ceramic, gives the viewer something to grasp by way of visual association and intrigue. A way in, perhaps, to the unexplainable combination of things placed together. ?

it To those who choose to look closer, they bring their own unique insight, their ith w e own way of seeing the world, thoughts, feelings, where they are, what they’ve tim ir e done, what they’ve tasted, seen, touched, h dt

carried.

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stretching tiny grains, 2021

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listening to a sprouting ball of something, 2021

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