Julia Jacob

Julia Jacob is a product designer turned educator and facilitator through her work with community organisations teaching young and old to make and create. Over the past 15 years at Fab Labs, makerspaces, men’s sheds and her own product design company Julia has been facilitating others to use design, technology, art, and craft to help themselves and their communities.

Julia’s artwork comes from exploring why things are the way they are in our communities. She uses small, ‘found objects’ repeated methodically on a large scale. Her most recent artwork consists of over 7,000 seeds to represent the number of people being detained in Ireland’s ‘Direct Provision’ asylum seeker residential centres at the time of making. The material she returns to regularly is pharmaceutical material used by loved ones. A piece currently in progress constitutes an attic full of commonplace and unusual pharmaceutical material collected from friends, family, and neighbours during the 2020/21 lockdowns. A portrait of a community.