Dr Melanie Jackson

Melanie Jackson (UK) works with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. She works with the sensorial and political qualities of the material, drawing upon tales of excess and the absurd, and inventive ways of getting by. There is a focus on the materials, techniques and production networks of bio-techno-capital, and their ‘ur’ formation across time and place. She works with tactics of representation which remain provisional rather than definitive, treating the gallery as a stage for experimentation with art roles: mimicry, documentation, myth fabrication, science, performance, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight.

Recent solo Projects include Spekyng Rybawdy, Mattflix, Block 336 and Towner Eastbourne (2022) Through a carnival of colourful, erotically charged characters, Spekyng Rybawdy encourages us to re-examine not only our ideas about who took part in the production and circulation of imagery in the medieval period - but also how this might enable us to reconsider the origins of dissenting representations, sexual politics and our attitudes and behaviours today.

Deeper in the Pyramid, a book (co-authored with Esther Leslie) and installation of animation and sculpture explored the bio-economy and its representations through the webs of care, exploitation and collective fantasy that interconnect life forms at every scale through the medium of milk. (Grand Union, Birmingham, Primary, Nottingham and Banner Repeater, London 2018 with an updated version to be shown at the Wellcome in 2023). Other Projects include The Nexus and The Ur-Pflanze (parts 1 and 2) – both exploring the myths and aspirations of technoscience: new hopes for the bioeconomy and for synthetic biology. It featured actual and mimetic giant fruits, animation, books, ceramic sculpures and a descent from a great height. (Drawing Room, John Hansard Gallery, Flat Time House, University of Bristol).

She often works with scientists, gardeners, technologists, manufacturers, consumers, users to bring together the networks around ideas, objects, and social practices.

Qualifications

Melanie was born in Hollywood, West Midlands. She attended LCC, Byam Shaw, and the RCA and completed a practice based PhD at the University of Reading. She holds a PGCE in Fine Art HE from UAL.

Teaching interests

I have held teaching posts at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and the Royal College of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, Wimbledon and Central Saint Martins Colleges of Art in London. I have worked at universities and art schools nationally and internationally as a Guest Speaker/Artist including City and Guilds, Goldsmiths, Camberwell College of Art, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Birkbeck, University of Central England, University of Birmingham, Birmingham College of Art, University of Bristol, University of Manchester, University of Leeds, UEL, Loughborough University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Columbia College Chicago, National College Art and Design, Dublin, Hamilton College NY state, and University of Waterloo, Canada.

I have given talks on my work at the British Museum, London, Drawing Room, London, Matt’s Gallery, London, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, Primary, Nottingham, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, National Museum of Wales, ICA, London, Outpost Gallery, Norwich, Spike Island, Bristol, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, Arts Catalyst, London, One A Space, Hong Kong, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago.

Staff serving as external examiners

PhD Examiner Slade School of Fine Art, UCL 2022

UEL BA Fine Art 2018-2021

Research interests

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

For her doctoral thesis Melanie Jackson set out a mode of representation that refuses western ideas of ‘capture’ or constructions of the realistic, through combinations of metonymic extension, text, picturing, abstraction to approach a ‘metasemiotic real’ or a world-making in art that can address the protean complexity of lived and social experience.

She is interested in supporting multidisciplinary approaches to research, including multidisciplinary methodologies of making. She draws on many scholarly subject areas including anthropology, science and technology, politics, history, archeology, ethology and gender – including the humanities engagements with the ‘ontological turn’. Non scholarly research includes journalism, graphics, product design, construction and pop culture.

 Recent solo exhibitions include Spekyng Rybawdy, Mattflix, Block 336 and Towner Eastbourne (2022) Through a carnival of colourful, erotically charged characters, Spekyng Rybawdy encourages us to re-examine not only our ideas about who took part in the production and circulation of imagery in the medieval period - but also how this might enable us to reconsider the origins of dissenting representations, sexual politics and our attitudes and behaviours today.

Deeper in the Pyramid, a book (co-authored with Esther Leslie) and installation of animation and sculpture explored the bio-economy and its representations through the webs of care, exploitation and collective fantasy that interconnect life forms at every scale through the medium of milk. (Grand Union, Birmingham, Primary, Nottingham and Banner Repeater, London 2018 with an updated version to be shown at the Wellcome in 2023). Other Projects include The Nexus and The Ur-Pflanze (parts 1 and 2) – both exploring the myths and aspirations of technoscience: new hopes for the bioeconomy and for synthetic biology. It featured actual and mimetic giant fruits, animation, books, ceramic sculpures and a descent from a great height. (Drawing Room, John Hansard Gallery, Flat Time House, University of Bristol).

She often works with scientists, gardeners, technologists, manufacturers, consumers, users to bring together the networks around ideas, objects, and social practices.