The Art of Gillian Jagger

Book excerpt: Gillian Jagger s complex and moving sculptures are documented in the Elvehjem s (now Chazen's) catalogue of the first museum-organized exhibition of her work. Installation pieces and works on paper are featured, including Jagger s Matrice a deer carcass found on the road near her studio, stabilized by resin, and suspended with dairy cow stanchions and metal rigging, all hanging above broken stones from a New York quarry. In Rift, suspended fragments of weathered board, coiling barbed wire, rusted cutting tools, bones of a deer, a horse skull, and a mummified cat represented the artist s protest against animal abuse. Jagger incorporated sections of a large tree trunk, cast rocks, a grid, chains, hooks, and pulleys in her major recent work, Spiral. Distributed for theChasen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin Madison "