Gillian Jagger
Gillian Jagger’s art practice has been a half decade long search to find what really is common to us all in nature. During the 1960’s, her sculptures relied on observation and fact collection by casting everything she could in plaster, including parts of roads, tracks, footprints, manholes, and finally water by adding cement to the downhill pour. The appearance of these pieces caused Jagger to notice similarities in rock formations, so for her next sculptures she removed sections of stones intact directly from quarries and kept the glacial original arrangement of parts by welding them together as she had found them. By the late 1980’s she began working with sheets of lead which she hung up and let slump into natural bulges before backing with resin. The formations that occurred in the lead and resin works once again caused her to notice the similarities in nature–this time in old, decaying trees and animals’ bodies. Since 1985 Jagger has been bringing “found life” into the studio which point to the essential, significant forms that repeat through time in nature–meandering, spiraling, branching, cracking, etc.
Jagger has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as SculptureCenter in New York, Katonah Museum Sculpture Garden, and …
Gillian Jagger’s art practice has been a half decade long search to find what really is common to us all in nature. During the 1960’s, her sculptures relied on observation and fact collection by casting everything she could in plaster, including parts of roads, tracks, footprints, manholes, and finally water by adding cement to the downhill pour. The appearance of these pieces caused Jagger to notice similarities in rock formations, so for her next sculptures she removed sections of stones intact directly from quarries and kept the glacial original arrangement of parts by welding them together as she had found them. By the late 1980’s she began working with sheets of lead which she hung up and let slump into natural bulges before backing with resin. The formations that occurred in the lead and resin works once again caused her to notice the similarities in nature–this time in old, decaying trees and animals’ bodies. Since 1985 Jagger has been bringing “found life” into the studio which point to the essential, significant forms that repeat through time in nature–meandering, spiraling, branching, cracking, etc.
Jagger has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as SculptureCenter in New York, Katonah Museum Sculpture Garden, and Elvehjem Museum of Art at University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at CCS at Bard College in Annadale-on-Hudson, Dorsky Gallery at SUNY New Paltz, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, and Art Omi in Ghent, among others. She has received many awards including prizes from The Nancy Graves Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, and The Lewis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
Courtesy of the artist
