nicholas b jacobsen (they/them)

Home is where my work is rooted. From the primary colors of children's toys, to the love and abuse I experienced in my childhood home, to the settler colonial violences through which my Mormon ancestors created our home, to the clays I forage from the lands those ancestors colonized and I was raised in - my work is made of, in, and about the places I know as home. "Home is where the heart is", and home is also where genocide, poverty, and domestic violences can be. By engaging with the tension between what my home is and was and what I needed it to have been and want it to become I work to heal the generational traumas I am heir to.

Historical research and memory act as the foundation of my art. Found objects, like quarried stones and religious toys, make those memories and histories material and allow these objects to speak for themselves. My media include installation, ceramic, video, digital collage, and writing. I use tension, layering, and decay sculpturally, aesthetically, and conceptually. Tension highlights the relationships between our national myths of innocence and the reality of our genocidal history. Layering places our past in the present. Decay points to the impermanence of the oppressive structures my work addresses. I offer my work as an invitation to others to recognize and reckon with their own forgotten and ignored personal and collective histories of home that we all may be able to heal, change, and build the worlds we all needed as children.