Developing an Art Style

Jacqueline Duncan is a fine artist working in Devon. Born in 1967, she studied at the London College of Fashion and has lived and worked in Milan, São Paulo, and New York, where she worked in the fashion and photography industry before dedicating herself to fine art. In Brazil, she collaborated with many leading architects and interior designers and exhibited extensively in contemporary galleries.

After the birth of her daughter, Jacqueline moved first to Europe and eventually to Devon, where she has her studio on the edge of the River Dart, resuming her career with the river influencing much of her current work.

Exploring the Environment: Textiles and Organic Forms

Her initial response to her new environment was through the use of textiles in interpreting organic forms, both underwater and at the water’s edge, investigating its froth, ripples, and foam. Working with nature and materials ranging from silk and gemstones to black-eyed beans, she engaged with the ever-changing aquatic worlds she observed and incorporated them into a variety of landscapes created from heat-formed fabrics, often woven with shells, stones, and other found materials. These landscapes explored both the interface between water and land and the biomorphic forms reminiscent of plankton and soft-shelled creatures that inhabit the water’s edge, and in a prescient way, the shapes and forms of viral life that invaded the fluidity of our bloodstream.

Evolution of Style: From Interface to Fluidity

Her interest grew in the water’s edge and its interface with the beach, with twigs and driftwood intertwined with seaweed. This interface between elements has been recently explored through a series of constructions, in which discarded sticks have been woven into complex shapes where wood, both matchsticks and driftwood twigs, are constrained by stainless steel armatures and tubular netting to form complex biomorphic forms, a metaphor for the interface between movement and solidity.

Fusing Fluidity and Structured Geometry

The dialectic of sensuous fluidity and structured geometry is further explored in the Pin Works, where Jacqueline moved from the water’s edge to the water’s surface, animated by wind, tide, and passing traffic, creating a constant aquascape between the observer and the observed.

The Pin Works consist of a series of interacting grids formed by cutting large painted and drawn images into tiny squares and fixing them to the heads of pins, angled to reflect the movement of the river’s surface. The work investigates the interaction of the tide, the coming and passing of the day, and the multi-layered micro-details of the ever-changing foreshore.

The underside of the tiny square images is painted in iridescent orange, creating an optical play capturing the magic of the sunset reflecting off the river’s surface and animates the work. These works explore the reflective and repetitive patterns of surface and water that subtly shine and shimmer as they are transformed through the observer’s interaction from two-dimensional surfaces into ever-changing sculptural forms bathed in the reflected glow of the setting sun.

From Structure to Fluidity: Development in the Latest Work

During the development of the Pin Works, Jacqueline started using a laser cutting machine to help form the complex grids of the cut drawings. In her latest work, Jacqueline starts to question the relationship between the grid and the complex fluidity of nature explored in the Pin Works and further develops it through the “Fold Works,” where the grid itself morphs into fluidity.