Susan Jacobs
In Susan Jacobs’s hands, an unconsidered trifle can tilt the entire world off its axis. She works through hunches, misreadings and material transformations, inviting viewers into a world where nothing stays still for long.
Image credit: SUSAN JACOBS,
Lady Muck (got peas above sticks), Installation view,
Threw a Glass Tomato, Darren Knight Gallery, Gadigal Country/Sydney, 2023.
epoxy modelling compound, acrylic, cast, brass, jesmonite, gypsum, brass, patina, masonite, enamel, wood
245 × 123 cm
Sydney-born and now based in the UK, Susan Jacobs has built a practice on the slow intelligence of objects. Her installations often begin with something modest: studio offcuts, found objects, the random, that evolve, gathering force through proximity and repetition.
These small catalysts set off chains of material and linguistic correspondences that unfold gradually, sometimes over years. Jacobs wants her work to “retain the sensation of thinking, and dwelling in the unfinished loops and uncertainties that living a life entails”, and she builds her installations to preserve that sense of openness.
Jacobs is wary of closing down meaning too quickly. “Associative links need to breathe to retain my interest, and to have a liveness and looseness that remains active and openended”, she says. The fragmentary nature of her installations is intentional: it allows “chains of meaning or interpretation to remain slippery and to flex and grow between proximal relationships”.
This looseness is a way of keeping the work alert to its own unfolding. Jacobs wonders whether making is teaching her “to become better at metacognition”, to recognise “untapped possibilities through thinking about thinking”. The inner world, she notes, “often outpaces vocabulary”, and she values “a richness in a lack of fixity”. She wants the work to share that adaptive quality, able to shift “according to the environment, mood or context… like camouflage or adaptation ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
