Jacob Talkowski

a wall of yellow take away containers stacked in a brick weave pattern.

B. (1997) Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, UK. A sculptor who sits at the edge, coastal, and watches how the water meets the sand; how the horizon meets the sky; and how the finger meets the screen.

Talkowski received a BA (Hons) in Sculpture in 2018, and has since been developing a teaching practice - tutoring foundation students in Norfolk, and working with multiple universities to tutor undergraduates in the greater London area. He is a freelance artist assistant where he primarily works with public installations. Talkowski has also taken part in various panels and events as a speaker, including for the WorkingClassCreativesDatabase (of which he is a member), a-n The Artists Information Company, and British Art Network.

Recipient of The Cass Art Scholarship, an artist grant from FicosWorld, and support from the Gilbert Bayes Charitable Trust.

Jacob is sat amongst take away containers at the bottom of a skate boarding bowl. The boxes are stacked like waves crashing.

My practice addresses coastality by tackling classism, youth culture, forgotten places, and various masculinities.

I play with ideas of care and tenderness, but don’t always finish the thought. Whilst referencing minimal art practices, the work talks to measures of value and skill, but with an ambivalence that makes it all a little subtle and hard to place. My work is honest, and sometimes quietly sad in that it declares if you cannot go back, you must travel onwards.

I want my work to have the speed of a meme, the flow of a poem, and the longevity of a fable.

The work is continually developing in a way that is instinctual and responds, chews, and processes the mass of stimuli around us in the digital age. My process situates lived experience next to academic research next to watching a tiktok and equates them all as the same level of importance.

Ultimately, I am unpacking and investigating how the edges of things exist from the lens of someone raised on the edge of both the land and the socioeconomic systems at play.

What is potential? And what happens at the edge?

Image credit: Jon Payne

a blue to white letterpressed poem which has strong indentation

Flatness is Forever – Edition of 10, available on Shopify.

painting of a blue UK one way street sign on cardboard

Legitimate Authors

a large format print of a sentence, displayed on a shelving unit

The Things that Happen

"Do you want to go home?"

Shinji from NGE is sat sad in a chair, painting

Untitled (🪑)

painting of a large mech stabbed with a spear

Untitled (🏛)

metal tubes form a structure which poems drape off

Exhaustion as the Water Rises

Jacob is looking at a printed poem on the structure

Exhaustion as the Water Rises – Exhibited at We Won't Stop Showing, SET Woolwich "Lukewarm bathwater, the sandbank sinks." "Everything ends in the sea." "Falling over the edge to land standing down, you are not as you are wanting to be."

For next year, I am trepidatious about the future. The world seems increasingly hostile to those in the arts at this moment in time, and especially to those who cannot afford to take risk. However, I believe in my work, and I know that I am an artist- the work is there, so the work will come. Next year I hope to achieve some sense of stability, to reroot and ground myself in a way that’ll allow my work to creep back out against the difficult environment around us.

These are my flat works, paintings and prints, they form the exhale of my practice. These underpin as saltwater allows buoyancy, flowing into the more sculptural expressions.

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Flat works

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Varied

takeaway containers inside a skateboarding bowl

Which Way The Waves Go – Exhibited at Downtown Digging, House of Vans London

Mound – Exhibited at Pure Class, Finsbury Park

takeaway containers stacked as a big cube

Densification – Exhibited at REVERB, Edinburgh

Column / Pillar / Post / Vertical – Exhibited at First Impressions, Peckham

The work utilises takeaway containers as a symbol of working class identity and sets them into a situation that questions architecture, construction, value, and skill. The status quo is questioned at its urban core - who are we building for? Presenting a precarity in its lightness, my sculpture mirrors the fragile futures we project.

We need more artists from poor backgrounds, we need to see work which reflects the majority of the population, and we need to see art that engages with these audiences in a way which is genuine, authentic, and without tokenisation. There’s an element of play in some of my sculpture which has proven itself to create an entry point for those audiences, my audiences, real audiences.

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Takeaway containers

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varied

Architecture class construction flow labour play RCAWCC Sculpture skill Value

infographic with lots of text and images

Comprised of two separate works (Touch the Truth (Retold) and Throwing an Anchor into the Future) The Things That Break Through is the work which appears once the couplets are defined, what is the poetry between them where the work resides?

For all of the planes, horizons, and parallel lines.

The Things That Break Through is on display in Battersea South, here, I present preparatory works, drawings, diagrams, and references. All information which forms the work, to help demystify its creation process, whilst also forming a guide to the work itself if viewed simultaneously.

Anchor Coast Diagram Drawing Edge Glass Mirror Poetry RCAWCC Sculpture Spear touch

PDF: Glass Splinter: Working Class Precarity through the Unsolid Surface

Glass Splinter: Working Class Precarity through the Unsolid Surface received a distinction and is held by the RCA library. Thesis focused on Glass, Touch, Vandalism, Ruins, and Class.

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Essay

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9,984 words

Class Essay Glass RCAWCC Ruins Screen Social Media Storytelling Touch Vandalism Writing

Jacob Talkowski

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Social

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Royal College of Art