Martine Jackson has spent over two decades, not unlike many master ceramic artists, versing herself in the language of clay; radically experimenting, wielding the material to its limits, elongating it further and further towards the sky, imbuing it with more and more of her own expression — for ceramic sculptures represent the culmination of a beautiful, long-standing conversation between the artist and the medium of clay. Martine Jackson has wrestled through the maze of ceramic technique, of external influence, and emerges as one of South Africa’s most exciting contemporary ceramic voices; birthing monumental, hand-built sculptures that resemble ancient, time-worn landscapes.
Jackson’s work is intimate, full of emotion and perfectly distilled — a spectacular husk left in the wake of inner turbulence; the eternal terrain beautifully scathed over time by cycles of weather. Jackson’s sculptures rise like tectonic memorials, skywards, but they are swollen with echoes of memory. The globular, billowing forms seemingly set in stone like miniature cathedrals, calling « maternal bond », « child ». These emotive works tell stories like landscapes; they are feminine and daring, reverberating with what it means to be a woman — the fragility and strength interwoven like elements of an architectural whole. The power of Jackson’s work lies in its ability to say two things at the same time. And in its ability to pull at us and move at something within, for each piece has been distilled to its essence like a line of poetry. Exquisite fragments of a much larger conversation. The beauty of this body of work can be found, in part, in each viewer’s ability to privately explore a larger, prompted conversation of their own. One might hear the whistle of isolated, sand-beaten desertscapes, or the murmurs of the sea against black rock. Or one might hear nothing but the silence one remembers from staring at a mountain in childhood. One might see igneous rock, or rain smoothed crevice, or dune, or the arms and swollen belly of a mother.
“We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks.”
Each of Martine Jackson’s sculptures is deeply complex; hand-coiled in gyratory movements from the base upwards, orbiting around a centre whilst expanding and returning with the contours of the sculpture’s waist. The pieces start as a drawing, or as a tiny clay maquette — for nothing is left up to chance when it comes to Jackson’s practice. The composition of each piece is meticulously constructed and considered; resulting in forms that, when viewed from any angle, are gracefully proportioned and evenly balanced. Each element of the composition flows into the other, like architectural components that support each other, or ripples in a river, or soft, synchronised notes in a symphony. Each segment within an artwork speaks to the other segments; creating a sense of unity in the composition that is made up of multiples. This adds intricacy to the work, for they exist as their own miniature, untamed landscapes — countries with their own distinct languages, and the titles act as peepholes into Jackson’s universe. Indeed, some borrow from the furthest, isolated corners of our natural world, windswept and seemingly caked in desert sand, whilst others become monolithic, and others still, take deep anatomical breaths.
The form of the sculpture and the texturing of its surface are equal parts within Jackson’s expression; two separate conversations joined together — resulting in work that is profoundly layered and sophisticated. Martine Jackson inherited, moved away from and returned in various stages to the teachings of her late mother, Barbara; hearing her mother’s voice and gradually, learning to listen to her own. Today, many of Martine Jackson’s sculptures hold the bulbous
form reminiscent of Barbara’s work — a quiet tribute, or remembrance of history. For all ceramic artists are imbued with the hands that taught them, however positively or painfully those teachings came. And in the ceramic arts, there is often some pain in its mastery. A bittersweet art form that, when seen at this level — with the monumentality of the size of this new body of work by Jackson — is almost miraculous, but most certainly breathtaking. It is a body of work that maps the contours of the artist’s life; her relationship to clay, her mother, and the restless pursuit of a deeper understanding of herself.
“I identify with the materiality of clay – both being fragile and strong. This contrast is shown in the sculptures. The grit of the surfaces, the strength in their scale, alongside the softness and the contours and curves. The feminine undulations, the flow of form. It’s an old language learnt as a young child, and has been intuitively used to soothe and heal myself. It connects me to my maternal love source and heals that connection.”
