Nature Gets Surreal in Ellen Jewett’s Fantastic Sculptures

Wire octopi, seaweed turtles, and more come alive in the work of the self-taught sculptor.

by DJ Pangburn

January 19, 2016, 3:15pm

Images courtesy the artist

At a shallow glance, nature might not seem so surreal. But a deep dive into the natural world, void of all human technology and earth-moving, reveals an incredibly intricate, dreamlike, and almost alien world. The surrealist sculptor Ellen Jewett explores these natural forms in simultaneously grotesque and fantastical ways, with animals that appear to be morphing into wilderness, manmade structures, or even other animals.

Jewett, who studied painting and illustration at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, is very much into acquiring “unfamiliar skills,” whether they're for weaving natural fibers or still-life photography. Her sculpture practice grew out of this lifelong desire to explore the unknown.

“Departing from anything I have been taught, my sculpture has always been an unschooled personal practice,” Jewett tells The Creators Project. “I've felt prepossessed to make surreal animal sculptures, quite literally from toddler-hood. Rather than being something I learned, the practice has simply evolved—almost without pause—since that time.”

Conceptually, Jewett seeks to visually explore topics such as biology, botany, anthrozoology, and horticulture. For shorthand, she calls it “natural history."

“The human relationship to plants and animals is an endless source of fascination for me both visually and intellectually,” she says. “More than depicting static animals, as in traditional wildlife art, my work uses the animal subject as a point of departure to explore psychological/abstract concepts such as death, ambivalence, wildness, domestication, domination, and interdependence.”

To create her works, she starts with minimal sketches and very little planning. Though the media Jewett uses is ever-evolving, for her sculptures she has a relatively simple formula. She works with non-toxic “cold” clays over metal frames. Jewett explains that cold clays are those that harden by dehydration without the use of a firing kiln.

“Perhaps as an artifact of my sculpture being self-taught, which was often without access to outside aids or equipment, I have developed my own handbuilding techniques that don't require tools to work the clay,” Jewett says. “The painting is primarily oil and acrylic applied by brush.”

Jewett is currently working on some bigger sculptural projects that should be finished some time in 2016, and recently finished a pair of sculpted cuttlefish, each of which will end up at a different museum. Jewett is also experimenting in two dimensions by using her sculpture photography as a point of departure for digital prints.