Melanie Jackson continues an ongoing interrogation of mutability and transformation. Drawing on the intimacies of knowledge at the nanoscale to the spectre of gargantuan monstrosities, there is an intrigue in the primordial to the yet-to-be-created. The ways that objects influence, socialise, or empower us – or render us insubstantial, are pursued to kaleidoscopic affect through sculpture, comic book sequences and moving image works.

Melanie Jackson collaborates with writer Esther Leslie. They have produced three publications The Urpflanze and The Ur-phenomenon and they are commonly pursuing liquidity; currently in the form of milk and clay.

Jackson’s is an expansive, ambitious and intuitive work not easily reducible to cursory description. Her attention to the illusory surface textures of protean forms is not solely attentive to liquid crystals but extends metaphorically to other social and scientific developments (a fictional Jack-and-the- Beanstalk becomes a modern genetic scientist, or crystals self-organise into a palace whose display function changes consumer society forever). .. her work carries within it a reflection on the new nature and task of the contemporary artist

Isobel Harbison, Transformism, The Arts Catalyst 2013

In the criticality of the work there is not a mournfulness for what has been lost, but the work is what I would call maximalist. It overloads the senses and the mind through collage and assemblage and defies totalizing frameworks. The work incorporates a generosity to its subjects, an enjoyment even in its discomfort and criticality… it offers what I would call “a radical discontinuity”. …a radical cosmopolitanism is to accept that comfort and ease with the world is a fraught and temporary state, but bringing yourself to account within the world and through it is what may make cosmopolitanism a force. This is what the cosmopolitan imagination can do.

Cosmopolitan Maximalism: Multi-Positionality, Excess and Contingency in the Art of Melanie Jackson and Vivienne Dick Rachel Garfield, Open Journal of The Arts 2013

Mel Jackson has been developing an aesthetic that allows her to reflect on the manner in which she is implicated in the condition of her subjects…She tries out tactics of representation which remain provisional rather than definitive, treating the gallery as a stage for experimentation with art roles. Here is mimicry, documentation, myth fabrication, cultural voyeurism, performance, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight. The irresolvable contradictions in this set of maneouvres keeps her own complicity visible as part of the circulation of meanings around her art.

Mark Harris, Made In China, Matt’s Gallery 2005

Melanie Jackson
melanie@melaniejackson.net

mel.jackson@rca.ac.uk

info@matts gallery.org

Selected works: