Jill Randall is a sculptor and printmaker, whose latest exhibition explores questions of conflict, destruction, and ecology at historic sites.

 

Randall studied at Falmouth School of Art, where influences from Cornwall’s industrial past began to filter into her working practice as a printmaker and a sculptor. Now based in Lancashire, her work focuses on post-mining landscapes and the creative and intellectual questions they pose.

Jill Randall, The Land We Live In, photographed by Dave Bennett

 

The exhibition forms part of the artist’s ongoing project to link Cornwall with sites in Australia and Mexico, where Cornish miners were a valuable resource and where cultural links still exist thanks to mining-related migration.

Randall seeks to reveal beauty in these “obscure, overlooked and forgotten” corners of the landscape which have been abandoned after industrial use. Many of these environments which we may perceive as ‘spoiled’, are gradually being recolonised by nature, creating a poetic resonance and an interesting – sometime disconcerting – layering of the landscape. Randall’s work plays with these notions of “non-beauty or an alternative beauty, and alternative nature drawn from abject and strange places.”

For Randall, metals are the key narrative thread in her practice, forming a vital part of her approach to sculpture. Randall has physically followed these threads to Australia and Mexico in search of the copper, gold, and silver mines worked by Cornish miners a long way from home, and to observe the vibrant Cornish culture in these faraway places.

Randall’s sculptures reference the destructive nature of mining and the physical action of bringing what is underneath up to the surface. Themes of the unique botany and ecology of old mining sites are also explored, as well as ideas about forgetting and obliterating, metaphorically and actually, and ideas about the overlooked significance of Cornish mining, which helped to build the wealth of Australia and the British Empire.

 

As Above, So Below includes prints created with a variety of techniques including etching, drypoint, and collagraphs. Repeated sculptural processes and even power tools are used for mark making during Randall’s printmaking process, sometimes resulting in the destruction of the printing plate itself. Rubbing out, drilling, gouging, and exploring the fine line between creation and destruction, are all characteristics of her processes, linking method intrinsically with subject matter.

Included in the exhibition are a series of new prints inspired by Eureka Reef in Victoria, Australia. The site, which was mined by Cornish migrants, is preserved as if the miners had just downed tools and left. “Among grey-blue eucalyptus forest lie rusty tools, remnants of structure, metal drums with ‘poison’ written on them, and deep excavated gullies where gold has been mined from hard quartz rock.”

The site includes a very poignant children’s graveyard; life was clearly not easy here. Randall describes the site as: “full of sadness, full of memories, almost invisible now, but a site of very important industrial and economic activity.”

Jill Randall, Eureka Reef – Forgetting, photographed by Dave Bennett

Jill Randall, Found Drawing, photographed by Dave Bennett

 

Randall has exhibited extensively on the international stage, and her work is in public and private collections in the USA, Spain, France, Australia, Luxemburg and Mexico.  She exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and, closer to home, had a solo exhibition called Aftermath at Geevor Tin Mine World Heritage Museum in 2016. Randall is well-known for establishing innovative ways of interpretating industrial heritage and showing how fine art can be a mechanism for cultural regeneration and engagement.

Please note that As Above, So Below is an exhibition in two phases. The second takes place between 13th Jan – 13th February 2025 at Wheal Martyn Clay Works near St Austell.