About
Jessalyn Mailoa is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, whose work spans glass, electronics, ecological materials, and craft-based practices. Her practice explores the entanglements of technology and ecology, investigating how systems of value are negotiated across cultural contexts. She earned a BFA in Glass and Graphic Design, with additional studies in psychology, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2021, and an MFA in Glass from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, with a certificate in Teaching in Higher Education in 2026. She has worked as a freelance graphic designer and in glass studios in Norfolk, Virginia, and Kansas City, Missouri, teaching classes and contributing to glassware production. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries, including the Chrysler Museum of Art and Norfolk International Airport in Norfolk, Virginia; Belger Crane Yard Gallery and Weinberger Fine Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Statement
Value systems determine what societies prioritize and how social structures are formed. My work investigates how hierarchies of value arise at the intersections of technology, craft, and ecology, examining how dominant systems, often driven by capitalist and imperialist notions of linear progress, privilege certain ways of knowing while rendering others invisible.
I view craft as a technology rooted in reciprocity and embodied knowledge. Unlike extractive models, craft often arises through collaboration with materials from the natural world, cultivating relationality grounded in care and interdependence. A craft I often engage with in my practice is beading, which was introduced to Indonesia through trade with China and India. Incorporated into ceremonial garments and ritual objects, beading carries a lineage of exchange and adaptation, functioning as a living archive of cultural negotiation.
Plants are another form of living archive. I draw on plants significant to my homeland because they hold layered meanings: they are ecological entities, sites of personal memory tied to family, materials embedded in traditional craft and ceremonial practices, and commodities shaped by global circulation and colonial histories. Exploring these entanglements allows me to trace how value is produced, transformed, and transmitted across both intimate and systemic scales.
Alongside craft and ecological materials, I incorporate electronic components such as microcontrollers, pumps, motors, and sensors to create systems that blur boundaries between human bodies, natural processes, and technological structures. These systems operate like living networks, questioning how technology mediates our relationship to the environment and to one another. Through this practice, I aim to reveal tensions within existing systems of value while gesturing toward alternative models of relationality and the ongoing work of making kin across difference.
Contact
Please reach me through email at jessalynmailoa08@gmail.com.