Jax Hall
I use various different media to explore existential concepts
Jax's current artistic practice has grown out of an interest in Jungian psychology and Irving Yalom’s existential concepts such as isolation and death, through her work as an art therapist. Working more recently with multi-layered monoprints, she has been exploring what it means to be human in a materialistic and potentially meaningless existence. Previous work involved covering fruit with different outer, protective coatings, cut away to reveal the slow but inevitable decay inside, watching how the inside and outside respond to each other. She has also experimented with then setting this decay and degeneration into resin, as a way of preserving the strange beauty and to stop time, and creating unstable and vulnerable moulds from latex and other materials, and seeing what happens when they are used to try and hold things together, stop things leaking out.
This work has led her to experiments with mono printing, a technique that has proved interesting in allowing her to take risks, and see what is visible and what is hidden inside. The last year she has been focusing on these prints, exploring what we show and what gets hidden. Themes that emerge are loss, ageing, the attempt to ‘look good’ and remain standing and moving, while inside there is fear and collapse. This has felt particularly resonant in relation to her father’s degeneration through dementia.
The process of layering prints in a free associative way mirrors what it aims to explore – the chaotic, unknown nature of the search for meaning in a messy, unpredictable and, ultimately, transitory life.
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