Jill Randall

 

 

Jill Randall makes sculpture and installations for specific sites and spaces which frequently explore relationships between contemporary art and the environment.

Metals, especially steel, magnesuim and copper have been the narrative throughout.

Jill Randall has recently undertaken a series of Artists Residencies in industrial settings, including abandoned copper and tin mines, factories and quarries, producing new bodies of work in sculpture, drawing and print.
Randall’s work reveals the sublime and beautiful in extreme and unusual places, and involves making work with and from post-industrial or ‘spoiled’ environments. It is often about reinvesting the forgotten and neglected. Randall is interested in the harnessing of post-industrial legacy to create work, and to use contemporary fine art as an alternative perspective on industrial ‘heritage’.

Jill Randall’s work is firmly rooted in contemporary sculpture practice, making and materiality. Though conceptually driven, the work exploits the qualities and associations of materials, currently metals and found objects, and often involves the recycling of materials invested with history and narrative through their past use.
She enjoys playing with, and subverting the conventions and values of modernist abstract sculpture, the ‘truth to materials’ and the autonomous art object. Her practice questions notions of material value, and reveals an interest in the unfinished and incomplete, the broken and damaged. It celebrates the aesthetic of ugly and abject, improvised and ‘ad hoc’.

In 2012, Jill Randall undertook a Research Residency at Tate Britain, studying the APG (Artist Placement Group) Archive. The maxim of the APG ,“Context is Half the Work”, is the concept which underpins Randall’s practice.

Ideas constant throughout are an ongoing exploration of the nature of time expressed through process on material, both applied process, and the natural processes invested through exposure to the elements, and the reinventing and reinvesting of overlooked and forgotten objects and  places .