Juliet Duckworth
Born in 1964, Juliet Duckworth gained a 1st Class Honours BA degree from Bath Spa University in 2020. She lives and works in rural Somerset and her inspiration comes from the environment she inhabits. Having painted for many years before and while bringing up her family she embarked on academic study as they left home. Her work became more three dimensional resulting in a multi-media practice of sculpture, video and photographic representations.
Daily walks in the countryside are a constant source of material and she has a fascination with the topography of the earth and an intimate physical relationship with her work is important to her. She is an Ashtanga Yoga teacher and enjoys exploring ways to integrate this with her arts practice.
Juliet’s paintings were regularly exhibited in solo and group shows in the South West, in private galleries and Somerset Arts Weeks. In 2020 she was one of 10 South West graduates chosen to exhibit at Hauser and Wirth. Her sculptures featured in Stone Lane Gardens 2022 and she was commissioned to paint a public mural for a new community garden in Gloucester, July 2022. Juliet was awarded a post graduate residency at Emerge, Bath for 2021 – 2023.
Juliet Duckworth is a multi-media artist whose work shows concern with temporality, preservation and regeneration. Her practice deals with materiality, scale and physical process, while exhibiting interest in the topography of the earth’s surface. Artworks are often constructed using natural materials which when transformed into sculptural forms are ephemeral. Entropy is evident in her work: while her initial control of site, source and material is ordered, she then lets the elements of nature and chance, alter and sculpt her work. Thereby, the temporality of natural phenomena is realised and the process of decay becomes part of the aesthetic language.
She works from the principles that form should be derived from the inherent qualities of the materials she chooses. A process of preservation and regeneration is evident in Juliet’s work. She seals moments in natural cycles by encasing apples in clay which are left to decompose from the inside. The final outcomes are unclear and relinquished to chance. The decaying process becomes a performance and collaboration with artist, viewer and material. Piles of windfalls are cast in plaster to capture moments in time during the decaying process and re-presented as sculptures. Birds’ nests are salvaged and presented on scaffolding to invoke questions about man’s complex relationship with nature and bring the outside in.
To see more of Juliet’s work follow the links below:
