Will Jack

Fine Art - MA (Hons)

School of Art

willatko@gmail.com

Will Jack's Website

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Slapstick Animism.pdf (1.42 MB)

dopo, 2022 [detail]

Project description

Will Jack’s work engages with figurative art, playfully combining motifs from its development throughout art history with the absurdities of contemporary culture.

Through the media of sculpture, painting and drawing he takes as his starting point the phenomenon of pareidolia: the human tendency to perceive images in random visual patterns, arising out of our innate fight or flight response. Pareidolia is thought to have been a catalyst for the development of folkloric tales – and even religion itself – engendering a sense of animism within the world around us. In contemporary culture, however, pareidolia manifests in different ways, often with a slapstick humour. Jack harnesses and reimagines these contemporary manifestations of pareidolia in both the images and objects he creates, as well as his methods of construction.

Awards

James Cumming Award for Draughtsmanship (RSA) 2022 Shortlisted for the Astaire Art Prize 2022

Suburban Crawl

By assembling miniature red brick structures, stacking them into a metamorphosed form, these works looks to humorously breath a sense of mystic and folklore into the homogenous materials of British suburbia.

SAGER#1 is a miniature sculpture that is part of a series that play on the shapes and forms of laurel hedges, another staple of British suburbia. The miniature bricks have been rounded in order to give them a hedge-like appearance and also to mimic the erosion of bricks in the ocean. This work was realised in thebox Gallery, a miniature gallery space created by Christian Bajenaru and Kristel Bodensiek. The title of the work references the 1970s BBC fantasy series, Children of the Stones. The series tells a fantastical tale in which members of a rural British town are turned into stone while performing Druid rituals.

Kites, kites, kites intimidate birds is a later development of this body of work. Miniature bricks create forms that resemble birds, which have been attached to a tree/pilon-like structure, creating an image that again recalls suburban spaces. The image of the birds sitting on the tree/pilon has a richness of association yet nonetheless remains enigmatic, referencing various scenes from popular cinema.

SAGER#1, Fired clay and mortar, 8 x 10 x 5cm, 2021

SAGER#1, 2021 [detail]

Kites, kites, kites intimidate birds, 2022

Kites, kites, kites intimate birds, Steel, chipboard, carpet tiles, chair, bubble gum, colouring pencil, fired clay, mortar, rubber wheels 246 x 104 x 87cm, 2022

Kites, kites, kites intimate birds, 2022 [detail]

Buffer Camo

This project began with a series of drawings made using a multi-coloured colouring pencil. These led to the use of the colouring pencil as a surface finish on my sculpture 16 u 6 6, applying a material typically used in two-dimensional work to a three-dimensional form.

Buffer Camo, Colouring Pencil on paper, 110 x 77cm, 2022

Buffer Camo Triptych, colouring pencil on paper, A4, 2022

16 u 6 6, Plaster, television stand, colouring pencil, timber, wire 133 x 95 x 105cm, 2022

16 u 6 6, 2022

16 u 6 6, 2022 [detail]

Aluminium Casts

These three aluminium works arose from a series of plaster sculptures, each created through a dynamic process of making and remaking as the plaster forms were assembled and often broken and reattached. By recreating found images and objects in plaster, sticking them together and allowing the forms to evolve, the works were then captured through the casting process. This allowed for the introduction of the flocking material and other aspects of the work to develop and also meant that parts of the plaster versions of the work could be reused in other sculptures, namely 16 u 6 6.