Jill McKnight makes artefacts of everyday experience played out to a backdrop of 21st century emergency. Often figurative, objects reference a history of sculpture, but are precarious and unpredictable; tender and shell-like, they speak equally of absence and presence. Materials such as plaster, chicken wire, fabric and expanding foam are used shrewdly to create dense barriers, or made to self-generate to comic effect. Recent text and language works articulate other intimate, yet familiar, routes through memory and geography. A deep-seated human menace is encountered within the works, which, over time, encircles the viewer from all angles.
Jill McKnight (b. 1990, Sunderland) is a studio holder at Serf, Leeds. McKnight studied BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 2013. In the same year, her work was acquired by The Saatchi Gallery. Recent exhibitions include: Five Finger Discount, Bronze Dog Project Space, Gothenberg (2016); Shape Arts’ 40th Birthday Bonanza, London (2016); Group Show One: Taction, Serf, Leeds (2016); 30/30, 12ΓΈ Collective, London (2016); Modular Intercourse, STCFTHOTS (2016); and Cascading Relevant Information, Open Eye Gallery (2016).
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