The Art of Gillian Jagger

Gillian Jagger's complex and moving sculptures are documented in the Elvehjem's (now Chazen's) catalogue of the first museum-organized exhibition of her work. Installation pieces and works on paper are featured, including Jagger's Matricea deer carcass found on the road near her studio, stabilized by resin, and suspended with dairy cow stanchions and metal rigging, all hanging above broken stones from a New York quarry. In Rift, suspended fragments of weathered board, coiling barbed wire, rusted cutting tools, bones of a deer, a horse skull, and a mummified cat represented the artist's protest against animal abuse. Jagger incorporated sections of a large tree trunk, cast rocks, a grid, chains, hooks, and pulleys in her major recent work, Spiral. Distributed for the Chasen Museum of Art, University of WisconsinMadison

    Gillian Jagger has recreated nature’s themes of death and time in her sculptures since the 1950s. Working in an old dairy barn in Ulster County, New York, she uses found items from farm fields and rural woods, as well as animal carcasses, stone cast cement, and other materials to form patterns, textures, and visual rhythms.