Catherine Jacobi is a sculptor whose work explores transformation and value through the use of found materials. By recontextualizing discarded and everyday objects, her practice gives new meaning to materials that might otherwise be overlooked, inviting viewers to reconsider notions of worth, use, and permanence. Her work is held in several private collections and has been exhibited nationally.

In my work, overlooked objects—children's life preservers, old newspapers, bicycle inner tubes, kitchen tables, outboard propellers, baby shoes—gather at the edge of discard. Marked by use, labor, and care, they carry the traces of lives shaped by systems that decide what is preserved and what is allowed to disappear. Brought together, these materials insist on being seen, not as symbols, but as evidence.

By placing the familiar within a formal context, I invite a shift from recognition to reckoning. What endures in memory does not remain fixed; meaning changes as objects move through time, value, and neglect. Attending to these shifts asks for moral clarity—to look closely, to resist indifference, and to consider our responsibility to what, and who, is too easily forgotten.

Inspiration: “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.”