Antoinette Jacobson's Bio

Antoinette Jacobson is a sculptor and painter whose work includes community-driven public site-specific art projects. These include an installation at the Rivendell Interstate School District, the Blue Mountain Union School District, the Grammar School in Putney, and the Roth Center at Dartmouth College.

Her painting and sculptures reside in private collections in Europe, the United States, and China. Locally she is most known for The Fire Organ, a mobile sound sculpture that uses fire to create mesmerizing and mysterious music that people have likened to whale sounds. She also is a production designer for film and theater.

She was educated at Bennington College and Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, UK. She lives in a refurbished barn on her family farm in Norwich.

Her full resume is available upon request.

Fire Organs

A fire organ or pyrophone as it is also called, is an organ that generates sound through the application of heat. My mobile outdoor instrument is based on a lovely indoors instrument made in the late 1860s by  Frederic Kastner, a French physicist, that was played by burning hydrogen through glass pipes.

This fire organ has wild tuning and its sound is always changing due to shifting atmospheric pressure. It is made mostly of stainless steel pipes. A French fire organist, Michel Moglia, taught me how to build and play them.

About

    SCULPTURE: Abstract, representational, figurative, spatial, illusionistic. Base, physics, gravity, scale, malleability, tensile, object, form, vision.

     PAINTING: Abstract, representational, figurative, flat, illusionistic, color. Picture, structure, tone, shape, vision.

     FAERELY FUNCTIONAL: Form, function, craftsmanship, vision. 

     FIRE ORGANS: Sound, music, pitch, rhythm, scale, interval, air, fire, abstraction, representation, tune, tuned, play, dance, loud, vision.

     ARTIST RESIDENCY: Teach ART. Talk, listen, think, look, see, read, write, draw, make, vision.

When we write or talk about these and other art forms these are often some of the words we hear. Often. There are of course many others. Perhaps I wrote those words to lend my work gravitas, perhaps to provide a smattering of context, or clues to the language in which they could be discussed. Two words that I included in this list and then deleted after much deliberation are good, bad. I use those words a lot. Many of us do. They of course have a place but need to be used carefully, when we really know what we are talking about. And do we ever?

Marching into the auditorium after a long hard residency with a group of elementary school students, a small rotund 1st grader reached up to hold my hand and beamed up at me,”It really is a pile of crap, isn’t it?” That was my last day in that school, but not the last day for the loving, hard-working art teacher whose job it was to instruct the vision of oh so many students.