Jill Randall

 

 

 

 

 

This significant solo exhibition brings together a new collection of new prints and sculpture produced in response to Randall’s visit to Eureka Reef, in the old goldfields of Victoria, Australia in 2017. It is the first time much of the work has been exhibited.

“The exhibition forms part of the artist’s ongoing project to link Cornwall with sites in Australia and Mexico, where Cornish miners were a valuable resource and where cultural links still exist thanks to mining-related migration. Randall seeks to reveal beauty in these “obscure, overlooked and forgotten” corners of the landscape which have been abandoned after industrial use. Many of these environments which we may perceive as ‘spoiled’, are gradually being recolonised by nature, creating a poetic resonance and an interesting – sometime disconcerting – layering of the landscape. Randall’s work plays with these notions of “non-beauty or an alternative beauty, and alternative nature drawn from abject and strange places.”
For Randall, metals are the key narrative thread in her practice, forming a vital part of her approach to sculpture. Randall has physically followed these threads to Australia and Mexico in search of the copper, gold, and silver mines worked by Cornish miners a long way from home, and to observe the vibrant Cornish culture in these faraway places.
Randall’s sculptures reference the destructive nature of mining and the physical action of bringing what is underneath up to the surface. Themes of the unique botany and ecology of old mining sites are also explored, as well as ideas about forgetting and obliterating, metaphorically and actually, and ideas about the overlooked significance of Cornish mining, which helped to build the wealth of Australia and the British Empire.

As Above, So Below includes prints created with a variety of techniques including etching, drypoint, and collagraphs. Repeated sculptural processes and even power tools are used for mark making during Randall’s printmaking process, sometimes resulting in the destruction of the printing plate itself. Rubbing out, drilling, gouging, and exploring the fine line between creation and destruction, are all characteristics of her processes, linking method intrinsically with subject matter.” (From CMAG website text).