Jessica Akerman Somerset, United Kingdom

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My material-led practice includes sculpture, textiles and painting. I studied Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art, and History of Art & French at UCL. I have exhibited in the UK and Ireland, received funding from Arts Council England, and was a Lead Artist on Artichoke’s national artwork Processions in 2018.

My work explores how bodies and objects coexist, within social structures and places. I am interested in the physical experience of working lives, and uncovering stories of architecture and landscapes, rooted both in the historical and imaginary.

My approach to making is intuitive and playful; I use diverse materials, from industrial offcuts, to domestic flooring, and painted fabric, mixing humour with particular colour languages — fluorescents, pastels, interior paint trends. I am interested in the space between art and design, how function is implied or denied; influenced by 1990s Dutch design movement, Droog.

My fascination with industrial architecture, mechanisation and patterns of labour is expressed through my personal experiences as an administrator and artist-parent. Source materials such as work songs, office stationery and Excel spreadsheets have developed into thinking about how work is structured and what happens when things go wrong. My current body of work takes as a starting point the Elephant’s Foot, a mass of corium that seeped through six metres of concrete, forming beneath reactor 4 of Chernobyl nuclear power station.