Artist Statement
“Roxanne Jackson’s ceramic works vibrate between the playful and the menacing. They abandon the dainty, feminized associations of craft for something more feral and alive, exploiting clay’s malleability to create something wholly sui generis: beastly creatures whose beauty and monstrosity emerge in equal measure, mutating the shape of beauty itself.” Max Lakin
My work blazes a new path to disrupt expectations of ceramic sculpture and to reimagine this ancient craft. By approaching ceramics from many different perspectives, using a variety of materials and techniques, I exploit this medium and question conventional notions of beauty — while finding beauty in the unexpected.
My sculptures are created through an exploration of form, extracting traits from highbrow and lowbrow culture, and riffing off both mythology and lore. Sometimes drawing from traditional and functional forms — such as vases and candelabras — I imbue these sculptures with my distorted mythology. Birthed from this uncanny lore, these metamorphic and psychedelic ‘mystery objects’ escape a single unified narrative. There are collisions of nature and fantasy, utility and absurdity, the playful, the ironic and the grotesque. Kay Whitney for Sculpture Magazine wrote the following about my work: “[Jackson’s] sculptures are brilliantly inventive: sinister, disturbing, and hilarious in the same moment. By asking how we can reclaim monstrosity, Jackson’s work becomes an explosive combination…extracting and exploiting the tissues that bind the sexual and the grotesque.” (Sculpture Magazine: “Roxanne Jackson”).
The sublime relationship between the natural world and ceramic processes informs the imagery of my work. Clay morphs from a malleable material into a hard one, and I maneuver heat and fluxed glaze; glaze is applied, fired, melted — it crystallizes onto the surface like igneous rock. Deviant forms are reinforced by vibrant, lustrous glazes — achieved through layering raw materials and multiple kiln firings. These practices, mimicking geology, lead to unbridled forms with complex surfaces, echoing the metaphorical and elemental qualities of both earth and flux.
