• Jill Jacobs is an abstract metal sculptor based in Massachusetts. She has an undying passion for bending, cutting, and welding steel into geometric and organic vessels. Through shape and line, she explores human connection, how we form values, the power of choice, and how we contend with change. She plays with the dichotomy of fragile forms sculpted with rigid materials, reflecting how malleability and continued curiosity can enrich life.

    Jill was born, and currently resides, in Massachusetts. In 2021, she moved out of the city of Somerville to a woodsy New England acre. There, she converted her garage into a functional metalworking studio, where she sculpts today.

    Jill’s avidity for art developed at a very young age, grown from inquisitiveness and a transportive imagination. Along with an interest in pen & ink illustration and photography, she worked with paper, clay and baling wire throughout her childhood. While earning her BFA, she discovered a love for sculpting with metal. Her work is founded in the ideals of composition and lighting learned through photography, and its intersection with her study of medieval, existential, Greek, Indian, and metaphysical philosophies. Through her art, she fortifies her own philosophical perspectives.

    Her early work consists of 100 uniquely shaped vessels. This practice taught her many of the ways to bend and roll metal without the use of heat. These vessels constitute a shape language out of which her current and continuous creations evolve.

    Jill has concurrently built a career in visual design, focused in marketing and branding. Her design work and sculpture inspire each other through the development of bespoke shapes and patterns, color, and compositional balance.

    For Jill, art and all other facets of life are deeply intertwined. Reading, time in nature, conversations, and supplemental creative practices, generate inspiration and ideas that keep her excited about the creation process.

    Jill’s sculptures have recently been shown in Newburyport, Marblehead, and Lowell.

  • As a sculptor, I transform straight rods of steel into abstract forms that are both organic and geometric. I measure, cut, and bend repeated shapes, and then assemble and fuse them together using my MIG welder. I consider the shapes and forms I create as personifications, and strive to share deeply human stories.

    I work exclusively with quarter and three-eighth inch cylindrical metal. The narrow profile of a steel rod establishes negative space, creating implied volume. When I choose to fill the spaces in between, the process requires deliberately building up density with pattern.

    Conceptually, I play with the dichotomy of fragile forms sculpted with rigid materials, reflecting how malleability and open mindedness can enrich a life. I explore themes of what differentiates us — the decisions and values that guide our paths — and the human conditions that reveal our connectedness.

    I’m visually inspired by the works of Isamu Noguchi, Ruth Asawa, Barbara Hepworth, and Alan McCollum. Their exploration of organic forms, surface texture, negative space, strong silhouettes, and the development of unique shape languages have influenced my work. My sculptures are also in conversation with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalism movement. Emerson encourages us to learn by doing, understand who we are and the world we inhabit, and to live in the present.

    My creative practice enables a dialogue between my muses, the tangible, and the metaphysical. 

  • Exhibitions
    2024 Thread, Sculpture at Maudslay, Newburyport, MA (collaboration with Rebekah Lord Gardiner)
    2024 Sculpture 2024, Arts League of Lowell, Lowell, MA
    2024 Variations, Marblehead Arts Association, Marblehead, MA, 2nd place award
    2023-2024 Eighth Annual Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, Newburyport Art Association, Newburyport, MA
    2023 Fracture, Sculpture at Maudslay, Newburyport, MA
    2022 Intersect, Sculpture at Maudslay, Newburyport, MA (collaboration with Rebekah Lord Gardiner)
    2015 Lynn Sharpe Honors Exhibition, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE
    2015 Art in the Garden, Clark Garden, Newark, DE, 1st place award
    2014 The Meaning of Light, Kitchen Gallery, Wilmington, DE
    2013 Art in the Garden, Clark Garden, Newark, DE
    2012 Passanten, LoBe Gallery, Berlin, Germany

    Publications
    2023 Making Problems to Solve Podcast: Cut, Bend, Weld. Persist (S1 E75)
    2015 Best of Photography, Photographer’s Forum

    Awards & Grants
    2024 2nd Place Award, Variations, juried exhibition, Marblehead Arts Association, Marblehead, MA
    2015 1st Place Award, Art in the Garden, juried exhibition, Newark, DE
    2015 Finalist, Best of Photography, Photographer’s Forum

    Education
    2015 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Delaware, concentration in Sculpture and Photography, minor in Philosophy