Roxanne Jackson

Lives and works in Ridgewood, NY

Artist statement

“Roxanne Jackson’s ceramic works vibrate between the playful and the menacing. They abandon the dainty, feminized associations of craft for something more feral and alive, exploiting clay’s malleability to create something wholly sui generis: beastly creatures whose beauty and monstrosity emerge in equal measure, mutating the shape of beauty itself.” Max Lakin My work blazes a new path to disrupt expectations of ceramic sculpture and to reimagine this ancient craft. By approaching ceramics from many different perspectives, using a variety of materials and techniques, I exploit this medium and question conventional notions of beauty — while finding beauty in the unexpected. My sculptures are created through an exploration of form, extracting traits from highbrow and lowbrow culture, and riffing off both mythology and lore. Sometimes drawing from traditional and functional forms — such as vases and candelabras — I imbue these sculptures with my distorted mythology. Birthed from this uncanny lore, these metamorphic and psychedelic ‘mystery objects’ escape a single unified narrative. There are collisions of nature and fantasy, utility and absurdity, the playful, the ironic and the grotesque. Kay Whitney for Sculpture Magazine wrote the following about my work: “[Jackson’s] sculptures are brilliantly inventive: sinister, disturbing, and hilarious in the same moment. By asking how we can reclaim monstrosity, Jackson’s work becomes an explosive combination…extracting and...

Artwork