Bill Jackson (photographer)

Education and career

Bill Jackson Photographer, conceptual and installation artist.

Jackson’s artworks are elemental recordings, the conditions forming an intrinsic part of the process. John Cage talked about the accident or mistake in creating art. Jackson owns the accident, it is very much a part of what he does. Meticulously planning his work, he makes all decisions before choosing and setting up the event. Jackson’s ethos echoes that of Sol LeWitt

Jackson works with this predetermination or pre visualisation. The concept of time is crucial to his ideas and he employs photography as a tool to explore notions of time and space, exchanging the classic definition of photography as a series of instant glimpses of the world in which we live, to a personal definition of ‘space time’. The combination of art and science as photography is a means to an end rather than the end itself.

North Sea Drawings, East Wind Drawings and In Search of Gretel are created on location. He creates a field of vision for the light drawings to take place. The unknown is the outcome. The photograph is the evidence of an 'event' that has taken place, a 'performance' that even Jackson himself cannot see in its entirety. During creation, only the process is evident. It’s through the inherent values in photography as a documentary process that he realises the idea.

Influenced by Pollock's approach in random mark making and the artists intervention in that process, Jackson builds a platform for these events to take place. The landscapes are carefully considered and researched by daylight prior to any 'performance', they are then transformed by the night.

A conceptualist arts education in the early 70's at Coventry School Of Art continues to inform his thinking and work practice. Drawing or mark making in its widest interpretation is integral to Jackson’s work. The mark, as an engineering drawing or a mathematical notation, is the beginning of the journey to new ideas.

In 1986 Jackson transitioned from photography and went into cyberspace, initially experimenting with early digital formats, combining them with analogue photography; major works through this period included Iconoclast and The Journey of The Skin Man. These were later used to illustrate the current concerns about photography at a symposium at The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in 1991. The print and publishing industry viewed digital as either a threat to or an opportunity for the creative industries. Jackson fully embraced the changing tides and spent the next 20 years exploring ideas in the new technologies, producing multimedia installations in both physical and cyber spaces.

Jackson has won many international awards for his work in recent years. He is the first photographer to receive three RPS International Print Awards. His work has been shown in the UK and worldwide including The National Portrait Gallery; The Photographers Gallery, London; The Brno Museum, Prague and the Museum Of Contemporary Arts in Argentina. His work is in many private and public collections.

Reviews

"Bill Jackson – The L’Enfant Terrible At Troika Editions......To call Bill Jackson the L’Enfant Terrible of photography and in doing so to compare him to Jean-Arthur R, would be to make the slightest of exaggerations regarding age. However, it would arguably be entirely apposite in terms of content. For both display a sharply acute ability to slip inside of well established archetypes and forms only to almost by necessity rip those very archetypes and forms apart by doing so. The glorious achievement of Rimbaud lay in his ability to construct poems that proffered formalistic perfection and seriousness with a very tongue in cheek attitude to content at the same time. The content poked fun at the structure, with serious implications. To thumb his front teeth at the mundanity of orthodox structures from inside its own structures; this was the foundation of the simultaneous intellectual brilliance and absurdity of the Voyelles.

And Jackson does likewise and as wittingly, in his current exhibition, Cabinet of Curiosities at Troika Editions on Farringdon Road. The series, Head, could at first glance be seen as photo-realist painting, with its careful attention to minute detail against a background of looser brushstrokes. But the nod toward De Chirico and other surrealists in the form of the actual mannequin heads and other odd elements is inspired in making the history of painting over the last 60 years eat itself in one image. For all his claims to be questioning photography (see his artist statement) I wonder if he isn’t also questioning painting, too? And, if so, all the better and all the more deeply probing for it........But he achieves all of this without strongly proselytising. He does so without bludgeoning the point itself to the point of solipsism. He does so while keeping his sense of humour and irreverence importantly intact. It is only the true artist who can both laugh at art while engaging with it meaningfully, and Bill Jackson manages to balance his walk down that narrow path. "

"Relics...a curiously pleasing set of ... antiques-markety stuff, presented with a scientific cool that belies a warm pleasure in the way that objects invite viewers to imagine stories around them."

"Contemporary photography as photographer Bill Jackson sees it, is moving closer to other artforms, particularly sculpture. Through his Cabinet of Curiosities exhibition he will look at the limitations of photography – often at the point of crossing with other art forms. A conflation of three separate studies, the exhibition boldly suggests that the photograph itself might be considered an object rather then a window for documentary."

Every now and then, with a bit of luck, an artist will produce exceptional work that immediately demands attention. This is the case with Bill Jackson’s Morphenia, a suite of sixteen computer generated digital prints.

His imagery was as spiky, robust and eclectic as an Hieronymus Bosch and his use of colour and ornamentation as rich and luscious as any Dutch old master.

Selected solo and Group Exhibitions

Solo

Group

Media and Publications