Artist Talk: Jack Bingham

Jack Bingham is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working with textiles, sculpture, and painting. He is a recent graduate of the Queensland College of Art and Design (QCAD), obtaining a Bachelor’s of Visual Art. Back in July 2023, Jack invited us to his home, and in our sit-down with him, we talked about his craft and crochet practice and explored the meditative nature of his art-making process.

Q: From working with textiles and crochet being your main medium, was it always something you’ve explored in adolescence and were you conscious of challenging stereotypes in doing so?

Jack:
I didn’t grow up with it. And I always wanted to, I always loved it, always want[ing] to work with it in some capacity… It took like a couple of years to actually get good at crochet. And I don’t have those views of crochet [being solely] for women, but I understand that it comes with that connotation. For me, it’s just [being] me… I’m [in] touch with my feminine side. I was comfortable with that, but I do also really like being a boy and… what it is to be a man. I do have a lot of appreciation for that [and] everyone’s got their own femininity or version of.

Q: What is your creative process like before you start making something?

Jack:
Very inspired by the materials that I use. I normally choose a material and like touch it, look at it, and experience that material, and that makes it a lot easier to figure out what to turn it into and what to make. Then once I start, there’s no stopping. I’ll just be up till like 3am until I finish something. If I feel like doing it, I’ll just pick it up and I won’t be able to put it down until it’s like perfect…
I don’t know how to follow guides or any instructions and I don’t have the patience to follow video guides very much, so it’s all just intuitive.
I like making functional stuff, more decorative stuff, which kind of is more just craft at that point, but I do feel a ‘fine art importance’ within craft. I don’t see craft necessarily as separate from art, but for me, it’s more the process. I’m more focused on the repetitive meditation involved in making something as opposed to the outcome. The outcome’s cool, but if I sit here and make something, I’ll like to cut it off, tie it off, and probably just, like, leave it on the floor, walk away from it and put the yarn back, and I don’t really care about what I’ve actually made. It really is just about the process of making it.

Q: What concepts or things do your current works explore or are inspired by?

Jack:
Soulja Boy. More like the essence of, like, 2009, 2008. Yeah, I think that was like my most recent large-scale work. I just love Soulja Boy. I don’t know. I didn’t want to make [a series], I’m sick of making series. If it’s going to be a conceptual piece for me, I’m kind of in this period, I’m not interested in making it very serious at all. It’s more just about the play and the thoughtfulness of creativity.

Q: You mentioned exploring more of the ‘play’ aspect within creativity, can you tell me what that means to you, for your art?

Jack:
Yeah, definitely more just exploring the play aspect of art making and what it is to be a human, to have fun—the basic needs of fun. It’s like such a human thing. Not everything needs to be serious or sad or to have a meaning, [it] can just purely be fun.

Connect with Jack:
Instagram: @jackbinghams