Having grown up in a family of extreme Evangelical Christians, Jackson relishes in the chance to obscure otherwise sacred imagery. Mounted upon white walls, she presents the hybrid in a state of completeness and dismemberment alike, applying an alchemy of glazes which, in Jackson’s droll spirit, makes tolerable the peeling flesh of the severed head.
In Black Flame, she unearths the final stage in a transformative cycle of life and death. A human skull emerges from within the sliced cranium of a reptile, jarring in a psychedelic palette of iridescent sheen. She envisions the third step of her plaid heads as a phoenix rising from the ashes, a burst geode unveiling a restored glimmering soul and a synthesis between humans and nature.
Jackson’s brother Zach raised reptiles; when she was 23, he was murdered, leaving behind an aquarium of chameleons that starved to death. Years later, when Jackson was at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, she saw preserved chameleons in jars in the Herpetology display. This triggered her memory of witnessing the aquarium with emaciated reptile bodies — a memory previously blocked out due to the traumatic event.