Jill Skulina

My practice is rooted in personal history, emotional healing, and feminist worldbuilding. Through clay, textiles, and drawing, I create work that is intuitive, embodied, and layered—driven by a desire to process, to witness, and to transform. These materials hold memory in physical form. They allow me to explore personal mythology, trauma, and the symbolic texture of lived experience.

 

Unfolding folds, enveloping, uncovering, rediscovering—I work through sensation and memory. The process itself is part of the message: slow, physical, and nonlinear. My work holds bodily aches and joys, emotional weight, and generational grief. It pours, bubbles, troubles, and erupts. It wallows, swallows, regurgitates truths I’ve carried in silence, now reshaped in matter and form.

 

This is a practice of deep care. There is so much heart in the making—care for the younger me, for the Jills before, and for my precious daughter. I allow space for tenderness, for grief, for laughter. I show, I see, I bare. The work invites feeling it all, without shame or restraint. I find power in sharing motherhood moments, in the sensuality of clay, in inhabiting my silver-haired body fully—dancing in it, laughing in it, reclaiming it.

 

I bring with me a hard-fought toolbox of diverse skills, knowledge and lived experience—containing whole worlds of theatre, art, making, writing, quiet activism, and community. My creative practice is a lifelong expedition: a route-finding exercise in self-expression, defiance, and dreaming. What feels good? What doesn’t? How can I confound ‘the man’ while living my dream? These questions drive me. I lean hard into the feminine—through colour, materials, symbolism and subject—constructing alternative realities that resist the flattening pressures of patriarchal culture.

 

Working with clay has profoundly shifted my practice. It has supported my mental health and helped me work through past trauma. It now guides me through the complexity of a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, the tender emptiness of single parenthood after a child leaves home, and the ongoing integration of five years of profound healing. Clay offers grounding, resistance, and transformation. It’s where I can work things out without needing to make them neat.

 

Goddesses, madonnas, and celestial beings populate my work as archetypes of internal vision—dream worlds, ambitions, and emotional landscapes. They often represent the disconnect between imaginative survival and the weight of financial pressure or daily stress. Two worlds collide in my work: dreamlands versus patriarchal structures. The result is not resolution, but tension, presence, and possibility.

 

The objects I create act as talismans—intimate, symbolic forms that nurture and confront. They represent yearning, manifesting, and the continual journey of becoming. My practice is one of feminine healing through making. It is a reclamation of the wounded feminine through a brave, defiant, divine female spirit.

 

My forms are sensual, symbolic, and often irreverent—frilly punk fuck yous wrapped in sincerity. I embrace the decorative as defiance, the whimsical as serious. Pink funk, layered textures, cheeky shapes, and tactile embellishments form a language of emotional honesty and visual contradiction. These works honour women’s emotional labour, relationships, love, and loss without sanitising the pain embedded within them.

 

This is symbolic worldbuilding as survival. The studio is a space where internal and external truths can be made tangible. Where grief and joy, softness and power, can coexist in complex, contradictory beauty. These objects carry weight—not just physical, but psychic. They speak the language of the subconscious, of the body, of divine women everywhere.

 

Each piece is a whisper, a scream, a scar, a prayer. A soft protest. A bold offering. An invitation to feel everything.