In my work, the simplest, most overlooked objects — old newspapers, bicycle inner tubes, kitchen tables, outboard propellers, baby shoes — all poised for discard or quiet neglect, come together to speak of meaning and emotional ties. These discarded things, often forgotten, find new life in concert, revealing the “something new.”

By starting with the familiar and placing them in a formal context, I invite a conversation between what we already know and what we can now see. It is a reflection on how the constancy of objects — those which endure in our memories — inevitably shifts over time.
What captivates me most is the way these changes unfold before us.

As the poet Richard Wilber reflects, “I do think it's almost always true that a poem begins when two things, perhaps an inner thing and an outer thing which hadn't been together before, suddenly converge and feel as if they wanted to make something new.”

“Catherine Jacobi’s [work] is a breath of fresh air; a well-received Sunday afternoon reading poetry, an evening at the museum visiting familiar pieces you have had a yearning to see.

The objects that dominate Jacobi’s work evoke the long-lasting memories that we have embedded in them. They remind us of the constancy of objects as anecdotal registries. The sculptural qualities of the work, much like Rauschenberg’s, confront the audience as objects in the world. Stylistically, the use of everyday objects parallels Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ — prioritizing ideas over the visual example and expressing subjects of times past and the passing of time so inherent in our human existence, whether internally or externally with the world around us.

But Jacobi is not interested in any nostalgic notions of the past. She is interested in inciting viewers to think about their stories critically moving forward and to allow themselves to contemplate in the present.”