Steel

2021

Variable dimensions

Born and raised in Northern New York, Margaret Jacobs is an enrolled member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe. Continual Kinship was created as a part of Jacob’s solo exhibition, Constant and Conscious, which was on display Summer 2021 in Franconia’s Mardag Gallery. This show was a continuation of her Old Growth Series which intertwines recognizable ironworkers’ tools with influential plants and objects found in nature. By using and modifying found chain and hardware while incorporating fabricated steel tobacco flowers and leaves, Jacobs imbues these individual pieces with the sense that they contain an old and established history full of adaptation, resilience, and endurance. Combining a visual vocabulary of tools commonly associated with metalwork and medicinal plants, Jacobs intermingles unexpected forms, colors, and materials in this ongoing body of work that explores Mohawk ironworkers and their relationship to steel as a material, the fragility and cyclical complexity of decay and growth in nature, and cultural storytelling elements.