About
(Photography Mike Black).
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” Paul Klee.
Jill Randall is a sculptor based in the north-west UK, and exhibits her work nationally and internationally. She is a Member of The Royal Society of Sculptors and Sculpture Network, the European organisation for sculpture. Randall creates exhibitions, installations and sited works, many in alternative settings, creating new audiences for art.
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’, Sculpture Network, Turin, Italy, (2010), and residencies in Grizedale Forest and The Irwell Sculpture Trail.
Randall’s approach often focusses on artists residencies in industry, such as factories and mining sites as the context for new work, and establishing innovative ways of working with and interpreting industrial heritage.
Her 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 in the rare plants and life forms that thrive on contaminated ground. She has a long history of 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 recently became 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.