Jillia blends organic forms, mixing the biological with the geological, to create jewelry that is familiar, yet uncanny. Structures, systems, and surfaces are repurposed and filtered through abstraction. she achieves these forms using a wide variety of materials. Some are carved from scraps of extruded polystyrene, others are made of polymer clay, carved wood, and repurposed plastic. Jillian fabricates structural components from metal. Regardless of substrate, she does her obsessive best to build up surfaces with layers of resin, and always showcasing color, pattern, and depth of surface. She hides her tracks as a maker to further bolster the feigned authenticity of my objects as specimen/creature.

Over the last few years, she’s been pushing the implausibility, looking for colors and patterns that would further eschew familiarity. She’s been ruminating on transgression, and how the natural world often defies easy categorization. Coupled with the desire to amplify the ambiguity, peculiarity, and otherworldly qualities in my work, she finds herself now exploring alien territory. There is a direct link in my creative risk-taking in the studio to my rage, heightened anxiety, and rebellion against the ascendant fascism and bigotry in the United States. This ongoing body of work is an act of joyful defiance in the form of objects for and about bodies that are exuberant, confrontationally weird and a love letter to queerness in every sense of the word.