Jacob Leary

Jacob Leary makes fiction. His work is a complex story grounded in reality but operating above the mundane but still rooted in it: it is not a flight of fancy but a complex extrapolation of potential. His work is a catalogue of transmissions and cryptic messages from other worlds and modes of being. Art as a non-human or alien presence is an idea that embodies the underlying structure of his output. His works are deceptively chaotic, but work to a logic that is inherent in all the structures he makes. Leary sees rich potential in everything and his work explores the myriad implications of objects, how they may escape their initial roles and explode with a range of new meaning and inference.

Jacob has recently undertaken a range of commissions for ARTS TAS, MONA FOMA, DarkMofo and Qantas. He has won numerous awards for his work, including a highly commended in the 2018 Glover prize and the 2012 John Fries Memorial Prize, a national award for emerging visual artists and he was a finalist in the Redlands Art Prize (2016). He has also been the recipient of multiple grants including a Contemporary Art Tasmania Studio in 2012 and an Australia Council grant for emerging artists in 2013. He is currently an active member of ‘Good grief studios and gallery’. He has been collected by Artbank University of Tasmania, Justin Art House Museum, RACT Collection, Tasmanian Government, llisington collection and Ormond College.

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The piece is part of a larger series of papercut-based works exploring the merging of certain enquiries into pictorial space with algorithmic processes to produce these effects. Fusing the mechanical language of algorithms with subtler handcrafted modes of production the work aims to produce an artistic vocabulary which both works with, but also reinstated its own creative force with technology.

The work which has an essentially topographic nature is as concerned with the meta-processes which defines its production as much as the final appearance it becomes. This appearance has a certain amount of delineation by me the artist but in a more pronounced way is controlled by the algorithms set up around the work, which exist as the blueprint for the form of the work.

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