About
Copyright Photography Mike Black
Jill Randall is an artist based in the North-West UK, and exhibits her work nationally and internationally. She is a Member of The Royal Society of Sculptors and the European Sculpture Network.
Career highlights include participation in the Venice Biennale and inclusion in the survey show ’35 years of sculpture’ at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, (2019), 1 of 2 sculptors representing the UK in ‘Difference & Diversity in Practice’, European Sculpture Network, Turin, Italy, in 2010, and residencies in Grizedale Forest and The Irwell Sculpture Trail.
Randall’s approach focusses on artists residencies in industrial settings, such as factories and mining sites as the context for new work, often engaging the workforce in its production, and establishing innovative ways of working with and interpreting industrial heritage.
Jill Randall’s work reveals the sublime and beautiful, the poetic and resonant in bleak and unpromising places, often making work with and from post-industrial, or ‘spoiled’ environments, utilising the specific chemistry and materials and processes on site to reveal an alternative ‘nature’ and alternative ‘beauty’, and exploring the unique ecology and biology in the rare plants and life forms that thrive on contaminated ground. She has a long history of innovative creative public engagement, facilitating communities to reconnect with place and heritage, and co-wrote the book chapter ‘Understanding the audience experience of contemporary visual arts at Geevor Mine World Heritage Site’, for the book ‘Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces’, published by Routledge in 2020.
She explores the ways in which the visual arts can be a catalyst for cultural regeneration and reengagement, reconnecting people with place, and bringing new knowledge and understanding to these places.
She has recently become a member of Incidental_Unit, an organisation which seeks to continue the legacy of APG, and to reignite debates about the role of the artist in society. Randall undertook a Research Residency at Tate Britain in 2013, studying the APG (Artist Placement Group) Archive in order to investigate the origins of her own industry residencies and the negotiations involved.