Biography

Jess Riva Cooper is a Toronto-based multi-media artist whose work integrates clay, drawing, and other materials to create intricate sculptures and installation-based artworks. Her pieces often explore themes of mythology, nature, and transformation, blending human and botanical imagery in ways that evoke vulnerability and resilience. In her sculptures, nature reclaims space, with plant forms sprouting, creeping over structures, and creating preternatural transformations that subvert order and invite chaos. 

Cooper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her artistic practice is shaped by residencies at Medalta, Haystack, Lillstreet Art Center, The Archie Bray Foundation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Program, among others. 

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Through her sculptures, Cooper addresses ecological concerns and cultural storytelling, encouraging reflection on the interconnectedness of life, decay, and renewal.

Artist Statement

I create artwork reflecting on invasive species, the parasitic, multiplying growth that exists on the borders of civilization. We try to keep it out of our cities, our homes, but vigilance can only go so far; nature will reclaim us. Sylvia Plath's poem Mushrooms inspires my current work, particularly the stanza, "Our kind multiplies: / We shall by morning / Inherit the earth." The parasitic approach to survival involves adopting existing forms and resisting the creation of new ones. 

As a maker, I work in an invasive, even parasitic way, using fired pieces and scavenged remnants of older sculptures. These disparate pieces are catalogued into containers based on size and type, creating a museum of multiples I draw from during my making process. I also create multiples of larger cast and press-moulded busts and limbs, keeping them in their softened state. These intrusive pieces pierce the soft clay skin of my figures and installations, building upon fired surfaces. The finished result captures the human body in stillness, frozen in a static moment of tension, struggle, and the reclamation process that intersects humans, objects, and nature. Ceramic busts and sculptures, once pure and pristine, become hardly recognizable, overgrown with plant life. Their heads grow leaves instead of hair, and their skin is punctured with fruiting vines. Faces scream in pain or pleasure in the midst of transformation. 

For my recent solo show, Pullulate, large clay plaques were created that are mashups of ceramic tropes and styles, cultivating a genteel, little-shop-of-horrors. My work comments on humans' often oppositional relationships with nature. As humans pressure the planet, what happens when the environment pushes back? When decay precipitates regrowth in new and unexpected spaces? Will we, responsible for the climate crisis, unintentionally create a hybridization of flora and fauna as imagined in my sculptures?