Jillian Crochet

Instagram: jilliancrochet

Website: http://www.jilliancrochet.com

Bio: Jillian Crochet is a Bay Area disabled artist working in sculpture, video, and performance to confront grief and disability. Her work questions: What is natural/unnatural? What bodies are included/excluded -- important? Her practice seeks to liberate the disabled body from normalized marginalization and oppression. In 2021 she was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She was a 2020-21 Artist in Residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability program and a 2020-21 Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. She has shown work at the YBCA, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA, SOMArts, the Mobile Museum of Art, and the Alabama Contemporary Art Center and has published work in Able Zine based in London, UK, Quiet Lightning, and Feral Fabric Journal. She has presented work at MAD Museum, Stanford, and BAMPFA. She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 and an MFA in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2020.

Statement: Jillian Crochet is a Bay Area interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, video, and performance. Her work uses haptic and embodied aesthetics to challenge the hierarchy of the senses and unpack disability and grief. Using elements found in ‘nature’ mixed with medicalized objects, her practice questions the medical model, desire for control, and the complex ethics of genetics and experimentation. A surreal sense of time and disembodiment shapes her work through repetition and duration. An oscillation of the subject/object relationship reflects and unsettles our understanding of nature. What is natural/unnatural? What bodies are included/excluded -- important? The unceasing work of self-advocacy led her to performance and interventional installation that reveals the inherent ableism of our built environment and social structures. The disabled body subverts expectations of how a body should look, perform, and produce - exist.