Life as Sculpture: Hal Jacob

Hal Jacob processes the world through his hands. Working with his curiosity, he delves into the abstract nature of his questions through writing, sculpture, and music. He translates these three interests as the mind, body, and soul, which make up his triangle of creativity. Jacob’s work shows the intricate nature of the basis of life and emulates the experience of perpetual becoming. Jacob is primarily a sculptor and he has been manipulating wood and other materials to create unique shapes that can hold the body or the feeling of the body. 

Jacob is originally from Colorado and is currently a Junior at Bennington College in Vermont. He has spent some time making puppets at Raptor House FX and has implemented puppet making practices within some of his work. In his free time he makes music and occasionally plays at open mics around New York City. In May of 2025, his work, titled, “Nursery” was featured in a gallery put together by Bennington students inside of an empty building in the town of Bennington, Vermont.

What was your first introduction to sculpture?

I would say my first introduction to sculpture was through my dad, who is a blacksmith. As a kid, I would see him come home with his dirty work clothes, his denim and union suits, and he would have to take off all of his clothes because of metal shavings. I would hear the sound of the power hammer from inside the house and I just put two and two together and thought he was a knight fighting dragons. My home was a log cabin, so I would look at the knots in the wood and see pictures in them. I have always had a big imagination and a way of seeing stories. One day my dad brought me out to his shop and turned on the glowing red forge and I saw him manipulate the shape of metal. I saw his work as sculptural in some way. However, coming to Bennington, and working with John Umphlett, was when the word “sculpture” started to make sense. Working with him made me realize that sculpture is just a word that represents all visual arts. The pencil impressions, the paper, and the paint piling up, it’s all 3D space and movement.

What does your creative process look like?

I would say that my creative process has been quite erratic all my life, but slowly, as I get older, I’ve been emphasizing a sort of studio rhythm and schedule. It’s becoming more ritualistic and meditative. I am integrating more research into my process. I sort of digest literature and all sorts of different media from films, books, and obviously other sculptures, which has been a very meaningful aspect of my creative process recently. I’m sort of developing an idea or theme that I’m interested in and asking any and everybody about it. 

Recently, I was at an antique store and I was looking at all of the stuff laid out in the yard. A woman came up and asked me if I had any questions and then started showing me this pill popping machine that you put in the back of a cow’s mouth. She started telling me about growing up farming and raising cattle. I started to lightly ask her questions, like, have you birthed a calf? What was that like? Do you have kids? How do you associate those two things together? I then got on the phone with my mom and started asking her about her associations with birth. I think I am slowly learning to integrate more of a system where I will research and obtain things into my sphere and chew on them and sort of vomit it out through my hands. I consciously integrate that  into the design of my work and the impact I want the end result to have. 

Where does your inspiration come from? 

I am typically inspired by any sort of metaphysical sense of introspection or a certain universal quality. I gravitate towards things that are bare face, something that you can project everything onto. I think that is the direction of aesthetics that I am seeing myself leaning towards. I’m moving away from these colorful, detailed, sort of maximalist ways of making, and moving towards abstract and primitive shapes. I like a clean, sort of geometrical and architectural design. I want the audience, and me as a maker, to project a sense of self onto the work. 

I take a lot of inspiration from artists such as Richard Serra. You can see the scale of it and the way that the audience maneuvers through that space.Through research, these big things feel more feasible. So, I think material can inspire me in what I learn it is capable of, but that form of inspiration is always sort of an application to a sort of feeling or idea. I think most of my inspiration right now is oriented toward a universal quality of life, and I am starting to use birth because it’s such a fundamental necessity. What is it to die in your lifetime and be born again and go through hardship and be born again and redigest yourself? I try to condense the inspiration of my personal aesthetic and project it through the inspiration of material, or form. I see everyone as creativity, it is this existing energy that we all tap into and tap out of. I like to believe that in regards to inspiration, I am just a conduit. 

What projects have you been working on?

I am working on a series of work starting with “Nursery”, then “Death of a Caterpillar”, followed by “Borboleta”, and now this piece made of rattan that is a wicker pregnancy simulator. I am thinking of the container because I made “Boboleta” to be a space for myself to be contained. The size and the scale of it is for the body, but it resembles a cocoon, which infers the covering and obscuring to be the point of it. Everyone has been in a womb and that’s what I touched on. It is interesting to see people walk by and look at it, because we all have our own associations with being in the womb, but not everyone has been a mother or will be a mother. I can’t be a mother, but then I get to project myself into what I might think it would be like to be a mother. My closest form of being a mother is to be an artist. My work is my children. The only rule I made for “Borboleta” was that people had to take off their shoes to go inside. As long as they were willing to take their shoes off, then they were willing to enter into this space I created. People had so many different reactions. Some people would say they felt very comfortable, while others said they were claustrophobic, and my mom cried. I am seeing the importance of treating the audience with a sense of respect and not expecting them to be stupid.  

Making this pregnancy simulator is taking some mental and philosophical leg work for me to put myself in a place that is not so literal. I am finding the ways in which I have been a host or am hosting something. It was a much more graceful process to make “Borboleta” because it is so integrated into who I am because I feel like I am still in a womb all of the time. However, this new work is pushing me to think about who I want to be or who I haven’t accepted myself to have been. I have been calling my mom and asking her if she remembers what it was like for me to be in her womb. I remember what it was like to be in the womb. 

What artists have you been inspired by recently?

Recently, I have been into Anicka Yi and Karinne Smith. They are both very scientific in their work. I also find inspiration from Bob Dylan. The music that I love the most is an instrument and a voice, and the voice has something to say and the instrument is there to say it. Those qualities make his music feel sculptural in a way. The emotional space that a song can put you in, is exactly what I think any work of art should do. I also find inspiration from film. I watched “The Wicker Man”, and it was beautiful to watch the construction of that wicker man in a cinematic sense. 

Where do you see your work going from here?

I plan on filming “Barboleta”, as a time lapse. I have noted the times of day where the light falls on it, where it is currently installed. It would be an interesting practice to get in and be there for two hours. One time I will do it with music and books, some kind of distraction available, and then I will do it again with nothing. It is like sensory deprivation, except I would be able to hear everything going on outside. 

I want to carve a forearm for this hand I made titled, “Fossil”, and make a film where I have different people sitting in a chair with the hand patting their face and letting gravity make it fall naturally. I want to let all of the fingers crumble around whatever it is touching, as a way to explore the life of the sculpture in motion.