About

I grew up on a horticultural farm in rural South Africa. My father is Dutch, my mother South African. The house was often filled with her floral arrangements for church events and weddings. Watching her work with flowers and natural forms was my first creative education.

On the farm, things were made from materials that were available. There was a metal scrap yard and an engineering workshop. I learned to weld, fabricate, and work with heavy materials from a young age. As a teenager I made my first metal sculptures from scrap in the farm workshop. I started a 3m Easter Island Moai head but left it unfinished when I departed for university and world travels.

In 2000, at twenty-one, I moved to The Netherlands alone. I lived in Amsterdam, worked at Unisys, then Waag Society, building a career in technology. I learned what I was capable of when no one was there to help. After a few years freelancing in Australia, I returned to Amsterdam with my wife Sarah. I worked at TomTom and was promoted to team leader just as we decided to travel. We spent a year on the road. Egypt, Cuba, the Galapagos, Mexico, Eastern Europe, Mozambique, South America. Standing in front of sculptures and natural formations that took millions of years to form expanded my sense of what's possible at scale.

We settled in Brisbane. I worked for over eleven years at G.James, a glass and aluminium fabricator, spanning technology and marketing roles. I saw glass applied to structures and frames of all kinds. That experience gave me deep familiarity with the materials I now use in sculpture.

In 2013, I returned to sculpture through formal study at the Brisbane Institute of Art. It connected the making I'd done as a teenager with contemporary practice. I studied again in 2016. My first major independent work, Sandberg, was a geometric glass iceberg placed on Currumbin Beach for the 2018 Swell Sculpture Festival. It was destroyed in the 2019-2020 bushfires before its second exhibition. I made States of Anguish in response. Then I kept going.

Since then, I have completed commissions for schools and public spaces and exhibited at Swell Sculpture Festival on the Gold Coast. I continue commissioned work through my studio MARLINSPIKE.

I am drawn to forms that hold two things at once. Above and below. Ice and sand. Despair and faith. Lenticular effects, dichroic glass, and forms that appear to float despite their weight. Water, layers, and botanical geometry appear throughout my work.

I make what I want to see in the world.

Education

Exhibitions

Commissions

Recognition

Bibliography

Jessica Ambler, "Common item this coffee-inspired artwork is made from", Gold Coast Bulletin, 18 September 2019, goldcoastbulletin.com.au

Artist CV

Manifesto

In 2018, when I returned to sculpture full-time, I wrote a manifesto setting out my philosophy. It captures where my head was at the beginning. Some of the language is more poetic than how I write now, but the core ideas remain true.

Read the Manifesto

Contact

I am available for commissions. If you are an architect, school, or institution interested in integrated sculptural work, get in touch through MARLINSPIKE.

For other enquiries: jaco@jacoroeloffs.com