Jillian Conrad

Jillian Conrad is a sculptor based in New York.  

Jillian Conrad, How the Unseen World Works, 2007; wood, Venetian plaster, rocks, Plexiglas.

Rocks are like people. They are an aggregate of materials formed slowly over time by nature and chance. They can be awkward and ungainly, but also glowing and beautiful. Rocks are easily identified and entirely common, yet there is something silent and mysterious about them. They are beautiful contradictions, and the same can be said of our own inner lives.

The solid matter of a celestial body is one way of describing a rock. It is also the title for a new group of sculptures I have recently completed that uses the forms and images of rocks as a way of representing the daily, shifting accretion of emotions and experiences that shape us. From the detailed surfaces of miniature stones to the overwhelming scale of monumental mountains, the material and form of a rock can be a gateway for thinking about ourselves.

In How the Unseen World Works I am presenting an object that is full of contradictions. Part geology, part architecture, it’s an imagined rock form propped up by a real rock. It is solid and stoic, but also willing to offer a glimpse into its more light-hearted interior structure, composed of light pink stones and wood framing. Its reflective black surface, made from Venetian plaster and graphite, and emphasized in parts with black Plexiglas, gives the piece weight but also makes the form shimmer and feel lighter. In much of my work, I rely on the dual nature of the color black: to show the absolute physical presence and soulful essence of something simultaneously. It is a way for me to unite the making of an actual thing with the image or idea of the thing that remains long after its construction is completed.

The materials I use in my work range from the humble, ordinary stuff of the construction industry—such as plywood—to more refined materials like highly burnished Venetian plaster. This friction between low and high, familiar and extraordinary, is a conscious one. I feel great empathy with the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, the construction sites as well as the birds in the trees. By mixing materials, I’m creating a spark of incongruity that can transform our perception of them. When plywood becomes a satisfying collection of layers, like books lined up on a library shelf, and the surface of plaster becomes a lustrous mirror, then the distance between ourselves and the world around us is shortened. We see ourselves in the world by appreciating all these little details and wondering about them.

The most interesting part of making sculpture is figuring out how to use the physical stuff that surrounds us; to speak a language whose subject is deeper than stuff. I can become obsessed with the external forms and surfaces of my work, but what I really want is to get inside of these things and have them tell me something about life. The rock-inspired sculptures that make up the solid form of a celestial body represent different ways in which materials and ideas are layered and combined, and in this way they look a lot like us.