Peta Jacobs

Peta Jacobs is a Bristol-based artist whose practice has its roots in her BA and MA textile studies at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA). She used ‘textile logic’ as a framework for thinking about and expressing the complexities arising from an investigation of light for her mixed-media PhD, Making Quantum Questions Material: ‘Soft’ Textile Thinking for the ‘Hard’ Questions Arising from an Investigation of Light (2023).

Through art, she investigates an experience of light from scientific positions—both its classical attributes (reflection and refraction) and its properties at the quantum level, a strange and paradoxical, non-local realm. Inspired by the theories of quantum physicist, David Bohm, Peta repeatedly examines simultaneous wave/particle duality, the entangled relationship of subject and object, hidden orders of wholeness and the edges of becoming.

Appropriating the apparatus of the two-slit experiments (half-silvered mirror, dichroic materials and prisms) as creative media, she opens up a visual language of possibilities, bringing the elusive quantum properties of light to physical form. Artistic investigation of these materials generates unique and playful kinetic artworks. Colours and forms are not fixed—they shift, morph, appear and disappear as the viewer alters viewing angle, revealing the radiant colourful beauty hidden within white light.

Peta has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions both in the UK and Japan where she was the winner of the 31st Takifuji International Art Award. Her artworks and installations are in public collection include Shadows of Distinction installation at Salts Mill, Saltaire and Beyond the Rainbow installation, a public art commission for the Lexicon Shopping  Centre, Bracknell in 2023.