in the studio: Jillian Moore

photos courtesy of the artist

We're calling this a Studio Visit but we didn't have the opportunity to see Jillian Moore's progress in person for her new line of sculptures (thanks COVID-19). Instead, Jillian shared these process photos of her work so we could get the inside scoop on how these are constructed! To see how all the works turned out, check out the finished wall pieces in Peculiar Reality.

View the rest of the studio photos below.

There are two distinct groups of work in this exhibition, though that was not my intention. There are the pieces I began before the Covid-19 shutdown, and the work I made afterward. All incorporate resin, a throughline in my practice, building it up in many successive layers to give strength, color, and pattern to forms created in a variety of found materials. All incorporate paint as well as pigments.

The “before” pieces came out of a week-long intensive residency, the “Smitten Forum”, at Pocosin Arts in Columbia, NC. This project, aimed at contemporary jewelry makers, gave me the somewhat perverse opportunity to focus exclusively on sculptural work for the first time in over a decade. These pieces came about from deliberate sketches with full schematics outlining a somewhat methodical creation (relative to how I typically work).

Foam was laminated, carved, and refined to create the forms with notes on mood that defined color and texture. Various materials were layered in with plans on how they would later reveal themselves through meditative, reductive processes and added components.

Then there are the “after” pieces, comprised mainly of the “Lumpen” series, that were constructed in a frenzy. With nowhere to go, and for the first time in a long while, a luxuriously open schedule, I channeled my anxiety at the moment into these pieces.

They are reflexive, sketched only in process. Materials were layered in, but intuitively and spontaneously. I lost track of what went into each piece, though all were built on broken bits of styrofoam and plastic that accumulated as we shifted to a life of order-by-mail quarantine, the detritus of the moment got sucked into the studio and exorcised in this way.