Juliette Bigley

I want to understand how the world fits together: how our internal experiences interact with the world. This is the stuff of our lives - both great and small - but yet we have very little understanding of how this mental experience of a physical world comes to exist at all. We do not understand it and we cannot say how it fits together: this fascinates me and I explore it through making.

I make abstract but relatable metal sculptures based on composite geometric forms. My work is made from sheet metal, sometimes coloured and sometimes left raw. Seams – the meeting-places that lie within a form - are an intentional part of my work. My work is crisp and calm and the spaces within my pieces are as important as the forms themselves.

Juliette Bigley, Future Heritage 2016 Alumna

My sculptures are ‘thoughts along a way’, made to contribute to my thinking rather than as conclusions in themselves. They are ‘punctuation marks’ in an on-going dialogue between thinking, writing and making with each discipline contributing to a more rounded understanding. The interaction between the creative, the intellectual and the material made me an artist: the method found me.

I became an artist through a combination of accident, curiosity and stubbornness. I went through a traditional academic route, very focussed on language (but language and making are both materials in a way – how often do you resolve your thoughts by speaking out loud?). Initially training as a singer, I worked for years in healthcare, but I was hungry for something else and an evening course introduced me to working with metal. My initial training taught me how to work material, but in the research MA I undertook at The Cass School of Art, I learned to bridge the analytical and creative. Looking back, that’s something I’d been doing throughout my life, but making gave me access to a rich seam of physical knowledge that I could have only got through material.

For me, the point of making is to understand, but by a different route. It’s also really fun. I make to discover some of what I think, and this knowledge then gets mixed into the knowledge that I get from other methods to create a rounded resource - quite literally, perhaps, a body of knowledge - of thoughts on a particular topic.

Balancing Bowl By Juliette Bigley

At Future Heritage

I made 3 collections of work for Future Heritage:

Balancing Bowls (1, 2 and 3) juxtapose forms, materials and notions of solidity and function
Tall Vessels all explore the articulation of the seam that joins them and takes them from flat pieces of metal into holding forms
Vessels (1-5) explores the way in which vessels – or holding forms - are constructed and their holding space built

“Making work for FH really pushed me to work at a larger scale than I had previously. It was a massive step up of the kind that can only really be achieved with a deadline! I transcended things that I had not thought technically possible and this has left me with a hunger to push the scale of what I make, but in a way that still enables me to make it myself. It was also a fantastic opportunity to exhibit a large body of work alongside talented makers and in a really supportive environment. There’s no doubt that it raised my profile and led directly to a significant museum acquisition. Thank you Corinne and Decorex.” - Juliette Bigley

Current work

Since Future Heritage, I have exhibited nationally and internationally including Design Miami, ArtGeneve, Tresor Contemporary and Collect, where I won the prize for Collect Open in 2018. This Arts Council England-funded project was my first installation –TABLE - and it has gone one to be exhibited in Edinburgh and Venice. Alongside this installation, I completed my first publication, Material Perspectives, that discusses various aspects of the making process.

I have exhibited with Sarah Myerscough, Hauser and Wirth Make and my first solo exhibition – for which I was commissioned to make my first body of outdoor sculpture – was with the Scottish Gallery in 2019.

The V&A bought Balancing Bowl (3) in 2017, and I have work in the Irish State Collection. I am a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Tall Vessels By Juliette Bigley

If you would like to make an enquiry about Juliette Bigley and commissions, get in touch here or visit her website www.juliettebigley.com