Aryel René Jackson (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator whose practice engages soil, compost, fabric, and residue as responsive collaborators. Working across printmaking, textiles, installation, performance, and moving image, they investigate how reclaiming occurs through material transformation by turning waste and overlooked matter into carriers of memory, pressure, and regeneration. 

Current work centers on soil-based printmaking and quilting to probe the relationship between interior and exterior life. Through monotype, collagraphy, silkscreen, mud-dyeing, embroidery, and stitched fabric, Jackson moves soil-based materials across surface, body, image, and cloth. Compost and soil act as active agents that register accumulation, labor, tension, and renewal. Drawing from quilting as a Black knowledge system of care, repetition, repair, and survival, the practice links housework and fieldwork as technologies for activating ancestral memory and ecological transmission. 

Recent series including “Compost”, “Compost Ghost”, “Compost Matrix”, and “Quarter Square” transform residue into prints and textiles that hold trace and the possibility of new forms. Video and performance works document and enact these processes in real time, inviting viewers to witness the precise mechanisms of transformation: pressure applied, marks registered, waste reanimated. In pieces such as “Re:Future” soil becomes a temporal collaborator in live choreography, collapsing material process, gesture, and projection into shared space. These moving images serve as both record and prompt, revealing the labor, duration, and subtle shifts that make reclaiming tangible rather than rhetorical.