Jesse Harrod has an MFA from the department of Fiber and Material Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. She is currently the Head of Fibers and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.
Harrod has been writing and making work that employs traditional and contemporary craft practices for the past 7 years. By creating both large and mid-scale installations out of vernacular and lowbrow materials conventionally associated with hobby crafts and domesticity, Harrod explores craft as a shadow category of art production to traditional or mainstream fine art. Foregrounding questions of gender, queerness, and their intersections, Harrod’s work tracks the affective and cultural circulation of meaning through which particular materials become designated as “trash” and “waste.” Across her practice, Harrod shows how these discarded materials can be re-purposed on behalf of insurgent imaginations of queer-feminist survival.
Harrod has exhibited at the American University Museum in Washington, DC, La Esquina in Kansas City, MO, and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in NYC. Her work is included in forthcoming exhibitions at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI, the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and the Boston Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-bow, and RAIR Philly. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Modern Craft, Artslant, and Hyperallergic. Recently, she joined Philadelphia-based arts organization Vox Populi where she works on education and fundraising.
Across my practice, I manipulate and transform materials to animate their sexual and sensual qualities and explore the intersections among queer kinship, support, and sexuality. In my sculptural installations, I work with rope as a pliable, linear element that I regard much like a drawing tool, specifically utilizing knot making techniques such as macramé in ways that can be understood as simultaneously restraining and supporting. I am interested in the doubleness of rope as an element utilized within queer sexual play and as a material that conveys how bodies rely upon and support one another, albeit precariously. Alongside my rope sculptures and installations, bases and supporting structures have long played an integral role within my sculptural practice in order to explore both hidden and unacknowledged material infrastructures that uphold formations of queer community and the sexual prosthetics integral to queer sex. Layering the faux upon the fictitious, my works decompose the opposition between surface and depth, enacting and unworking the relationship between supporting structure and artwork such that the support merges with the surface. My paintings and video pieces work in tandem with my sculptural practice. Both consider the romances of queer collectivity, even as they point to the complexities and ambivalences of relationality. I view my sculptural works as inhabitants of queer communities that at once cite particular bodies through their formal arrangements and incite a particular spectatorial relation, one which always involves a negotiation with the pleasures and intrusions of hapticity. Similarly, my drawings and paintings involve the viewer in a complex narrative world of queer kinship that is at once erotic and enticing, yet estranging and disorienting. My work employs a maximalist aesthetic to convey the enormity and messiness of feeling in the face of the political structures that confine queer bodies. For this reason, I tend towards a direct form of address. Indeed, I want my works to scream at you much like the prototypical 1970s feminist screams at you. In so doing, my work builds on and augments histories of queer-feminist militancy in artistic production.
- MFA from the department of Fiber and Material Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago
- BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University
Head of Fibers and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia
NAFTAE 