Drawing, glass, and light: these three ingredients are the basis of Katherine Jackson’s work. She begins with drawing, which sometimes becomes an end in itself. But often the images are sandblasted onto glass panels, lit along the edge by LED strips, and displayed in steel frames or stands, or suspended. The images themselves are composed of her drawings: lines (of poetry, of scientific inquiry, of thought, of gestures), broken into dots or pulses. When the LEDs shine through the etched panels, the dots glow, forming multiple light-paths, making vivid the mind’s search for ways through, and the shifting perspectives that haunt our “readings” of the world.
Recently, Jackson has been working with glass and light in other ways; for example, casting the shapes of miniature oil cans, in all their variety, in colorful glass and setting them, singly or in small groupings, on light boxes.
This project, Little Oil, is a collection of over fifty cast glass oil cans, each unique in color and/or shape, set on light boxes. For “Illuminated,” Jackson will place her sculptures in custom-made vitrines. The glowing vessels provide a space of reflection where one can make innumerable associations in their minds.
As the title suggests, Little Oil embodies, first and foremost, a comment on Big Oil, by suggesting the infinitely more modest application of fossil fuel to lubricate engines parts, tools, rusty hinges, sewing machines, etc.
By installing these objects atop light boxes, where each one glows from within, these pieces can seem more like vessels of light themselves.
Oils of various kinds were the preferred source of light for most of human history, as well as of eternal light in many faith traditions. Oil is derived from myriad sources, some of which Jackson finds unacceptable (animals), some benign (plants, nuts, etc.), and is used for myriad purposes besides providing light: cooking, healing, soothing, as aromatic essences, etc.
The more one looks at these pieces, the more they seem to transcend oil altogether and take on animate, creaturely, or even anthropomorphic qualities -- with their various shapes and sizes, and spouts going this way and that.
Katherine Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries, universities, and public spaces in New York City, multiple other US venues, Rome and Berlin.
Jackson’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions focusing on art and technology and art & light.
She has had solo exhibtions at Bennington College, and Hobart & William Smith Colleges.
Her large-scale installations have been placed in various public spaces in Manhattan and include a commissioned sculpture at Interface, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the windows of the NY Tenement Museum; as well as a multi-windows exhibit in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Manhattan Bridge.
Jackson’s work has been featured in numerous arts journals. Her drawings can be found on the covers and within numerous books of poetry.