Jude Crilly (1982, UK/CA) is a visual artist.
Her work has been shown at Kupfer Gallery, UK (2022); Maison Populaire, FR (2021); Whitstable Biennale, UK (2018); Stroom Den Haag (2017); Galerie Nadine Feront, BE (2017); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, LT (2016); Transformation Marathon, Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2015); Camden Art Centre, London (2015). See full CV in link below.
She was an artist-in-residence at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, from 2018–2020.
Other artist residencies include Rupert Residency Program, Lithuania (2016), and Hospitalfield Artist Residency, Scotland (2015).
Jude Crilly graduated from Royal College of Art, London in 2015 (MA Sculpture), and Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam in 2010 (BA Graphic Design).
Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, Niemeijer Fonds, a-n Fund, Elephant Trust UK, and Genootschap Noorthey. Her work is held in various private collections.
Artist’s statement
I am an artist, working with installation, sculpture, sound, writing and drawing. Language is at the core of my mixed-media installations. My work is about crafting new pathways into knowledge systems. I’m interested in how the individual functions (or malfunctions) when the body, physicality, intimacy, knowledge and technology intersect. The complexity of knowledge systems means we have lost our ways of navigating them. In my work I purposefully get lost—and then intuitively create new pathways and meanings. I use the ‘soft technology’ of language to probe the tough lining of this complexity, in a playful and restless way.
As an artistic approach I mainly use collage to navigate these systems: using crafted objects, sound, text and images together. I work across many media and processes to create an inventory of personal vocabulary, both 3D and 2D, both machine-made and hand-made. These loose ‘parts’ are my building pieces which I intuitively fit together, in some ways similar to machine-learning point clouds—but in a highly personal and poetic way.
The pathways between A & B can be messy and digressive. However, the messiness gains clarity in certain moments. I feel comfortable working within this chaos, which gives me a vantage point where I can look closely at how visual and linguistic systems are constructed—and ultimately how they unite or divide people. We can, as Audre Lorde said, ‘examine the distortions which comes from our misnaming of our differences, and their effects upon human behaviour and expectation’. This misnaming is an important theme for me: as the standardising effect of technology means that language becomes less and less effective at describing nuanced experience. As a counterpoint I examine language as if from anew: to be able to unlearn and relearn elements of language as a means of renewal and of re-inhabiting devastated zones of experience.
In 2019, I began making my moodboard and codex works. The installation Ribbons (Rijksakademie Open Studios, 2019) used the idea of the moodboard to create unique connections between the themes of health, eroticism, food, care and visible and invisible labour. I sought to disentangle these thematic ‘ribbons’ from broader systems, and reweave them into new constellations with their own poetic logic. My newer codex works (2020–present) bring together these ribbons in a more compact and detailed way. For me these moodboards and codexes are a personal strategy for challenging master narratives and classifications. They are an enactment of a thinking process rather than a presentation of a final idea.
Currently I am researching and experimenting with a series of new codex sculptures—which bring together the diverse themes of early learning, the nervous system, medieval diagram trees and computational linguistics. My material research includes drawing, tapestry, coding and typography.
