Jacob Carter

Jacob Carter is an installation artist who has exhibited in the United Kingdom, particularly in the Birmingham and London metropolitan areas. Recent exhibitions include Eagle Works in Wolverhampton, Stryx Gallery and Eastside Projects in Birmingham, Art'otel in London, and LTB Showrooms in Coventry.

Utilizing both mechanical function and conceptual form, the works of Jacob Carter convey an unnerving metaphorical disturbance within the confines of assembled form. Utilizing materials such as beeswax, wood, and stone, the artist converges naturality with absurdity as dangling pieces of string will sometimes manically and illogically flicker against surfaces. The works are in a state of flux, not in process, but rather in interpretation. The fluxus nature derives from the repetition and communicating a profound absurdity with mechanical function without an intended purpose other than to create a conceptual disruption. 

Some of Jacob Carter’s works represent fragments, rather than sculptural elements. Such as in the case of his pieces of artifact-like objects scattered on the floor, as if they are fragmented pieces of personal memory and identification. Other examples include his most notable installation of Something is Happening Here.

In Something is Happening Here (pictured above) there is a measurement of time, as the penetration of focused light slowly destroys a block of beeswax suspended on an apparatus. The intense light and the lucid, luminous yellow and orange colors which entail such a project reveals the consistency in the work of Jacob Carter conveying a profound conceptual disturbance. With Something is Happening Here, time is a destructive element through the power of illumination, which has implications on our lives as an element of soft erosion on our bodies and the environment. In essence, the installation asks the philosophical question of what does time mean to us as a force which works against us, much like how over the span of an extended duration, the installation slowly burns the wax to reveal a cavity. This hollow anomaly becomes a metaphor for the emptiness within contemporary identity and our personal lives within the digital realm. Something is Happening Here is an indirect commentary on the process of aging, both from a biological and environmental connotation. 

What the work of Jacob Carter represents is a profound sorrow, cynicism, a state of flux in interpretation rather than process, and and unnerving philosophical implication. His approach to installation should be appreciated as a study of time, space, identity and the convergence of the mechanical with the biological. Much like the concept of a cyborg, the machinations of Jacob Carter create apparatuses which are a cataclysmic reference towards the symbolic objects which represent the dichotomy between the natural world and the synthetic. By incorporating natural elements such as flowing mechanized water, wood, stone, and beeswax, his choice of materials imply the status of time pertaining to symbolic meanings open to interpretation.

https://www.jacobcarterstudio.com