Jill Hedrick Harster Lipka

Born and raised in California, I am a visual artist with a focus in biomorphic sculpture. I moved to Lodi, California, in 2016, after living in Alaska for almost 20 years.

While in Alaska, I worked for museums on Kodiak Island – most recently serving as the Curator of Education at the Kodiak History Museum. I also worked designing and fabricating museum exhibits and teaching traditional knowledge I learned from Alaska Native Elders to young people in village schools with the Alutiiq Museum. My job also entailed working on numerous remote archaeological digs and surveys. I loved this work and often found myself sketching and writing field notes along rivers in total awe of my life. I feel similarly now as I look around my studio and recognize how fortunate I am to have a studio practice.

On the outside, I am a stereotypical eccentric artist with a pleasantly chaotic studio full of work in progress, sketches, and wonderful bits and pieces of inspiration. On the inside, I am curious and quite nerdy. I also love to laugh!

My daily art practice involves coffee and sculpting in wood, copper, plaster, or working with my handmade modeling compounds. My work often explores organic shapes, symbolism, and how light settles in the curves of my forms.

My sculpting process is largely unplanned and often starts simply with decisions on material, size, and feel. I frequently make my own modeling compounds and build my work layer by layer – carving and shaping along the way.

I like my forms to feel familiar and comfortable and I use a repetition or pattern of shapes across my work. These forms may visually feel like ripples, leaves or rivulets of water, windy swooshes or circles. My forms often cradle one another or are complete as a singular organic shape with a patterned flow. Human heads and faces are also found in my work.

© 2023 Jill HH Lipka. All rights reserved.