Approved: 08.02.2010

Jill Randall

Artist, Lecturer / academic, Maker, Researcher

Approved: 08.02.2010

Jill Randall's work is firmly rooted in contemporary sculpture and installation practice, making and materiality, and comprises objects, installation, prints and drawings. Much of the work is site-specific, and has included large-scale public art projects involving partnership working with architects, landscape architects and engineers. Randall's work investigates the nature of time through

Read more ...

 

Artist Statement

Jill Randall's work is firmly rooted in contemporary sculpture and installation practice, making and materiality, and comprises objects, installation, prints and drawings. Much of the work is site-specific, and has included large-scale public art projects involving partnership working with architects, landscape architects and engineers. Randall's work investigates the nature of time through the dual preoccupations of archaeology and alchemy, and recent projects have involved collaborations with scientists and industrial processes, including Residencies at a magnesium factory, a copper mine, and a Natural History Museum. These Residencies have become increasingly important as the starting-point and driver of the work. Conceptually driven, the work exploits the qualities and associations of materials, currently metals and found objects, and often involves the recycling of materials invested with history and narrative through their past use. It often reveals the sublime and beautiful, the poetic and resonant in bleak and unpromising environments, and involves making work with and from post-industrial, 'toxic', or 'spoiled environments. Jill Randall is interested in the harnessing of this post-industrial legacy to create artworks, and to use contemporary fine art as an alternative perspective on industrial heritage. Jill Randall has created several interventions in industrial environments, going as an artist into non-art situations and responding to the place and the people, a process the artist describes as “slow burn”, often resulting in collaborative new works with the workforce and industrial processes.This work is often about reinventing and reinvesting the forgotten and neglected, revealing the underbelly of place and people, and makes connections between apparently disparate objects and places. Jill Randall enjoys playing with, and subverting the conventions and values of modernist abstract sculpture, the 'truth to materials' and the autonomous art object. It questions notions of material value, and reveals an interest in the unfinished and incomplete, the broken and damaged. It celebrates the aesthetic of ugly and abject, improvised and 'ad hoc'.

CV & Education

Qualifications and training 1982 - M.A. Fine Art Sculpture, Manchester Polytechnic, Manchester , UK. 1978 - B.A. (Hons) Fine Art (Sculpture), Falmouth School of Art, Cornwall, UK. Solo exhibitions 2011 - "Golden Venture", National Waterfront Museum (National Industrial Museum of Wales), Swansea, Wales, UK. 2005 - Secrets and Lives, Yard Gallery, Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, Nottingham, UK 2003 - Light Matter, The Lowry, Salford, Manchester Group exhibitions 2010 - “European Sculpture - Difference & Diversity”, Martini Arte Internazionale & Sculpture Network,Nave Gallery, Parco Culturale Le Serre,, Grugliasco, Turin, Italy 2008 - “A Sense of Place - Sculpture in the Garden”, Harold Martin Botanic Garden, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. 2006 - "Twins", Kunst Galerie, Bocholt, Germany Residencies 2008 - "Valley of Stone" Project, Whitworth Stone Quarry/Horse & Bamboo Theatre, Rossendale Valley, Lancs, UK. 2007 - Artists At Work' Award/Residency, Parys Mountain Copper Mine, Anglesey, North Wales 2004 - Artists Residency commissioned by the Yard Gallery, Wollaton Hall Natural History Museum, Nottingham, UK. 1999 - Artist In Industry Residency, Magnesium Elektron, Salford, UK. 1999 - Grizedale Forest Artist-In-Residence, Grizedale Forest, Cumbria, UK Public commissions 2009 - 'Hiddenplace' Project, Burnley Town Centre, Lancs, UK 2006 - A13 Artescape Barking Town Centre, Mill Pool Public Space, Barking, London, UK 2000 - Irwell Sculpture Trail Commission/Residency, Magnesium Elektron, Salford, Lancs Projects 2013 - 'The Open Brief', Flat Time House, London, UK 2012 - Research Residency, Tate Britain, London, UK