About
Jessalyn Mailoa is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. She moved to the United States in 2017 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Glass and Graphic Design while also studying psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After graduating, she worked as a freelance graphic designer and spent several years at glass studios in Norfolk, Virginia, and Kansas City, Missouri, where she taught public glassblowing classes, produced glassware, and exhibited work in various galleries, including the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk International Airport, Belger Crane Yard Gallery, Weinberger Fine Art, and others. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in glass at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Statement
Value systems determine what is significant, who belongs, and how social structures are organized. My work investigates how hierarchies of value arise at the intersections of technology, craft, and ecology. I analyze how dominant systems, often driven by capitalist and imperialist notions of linear progress, privilege certain ways of understanding while rendering others invisible.
I view craft as a technology rooted in relationality and embodied knowledge. Unlike antagonistic models, craft emerges through collaboration with and intimate understanding of materials and the natural world. Its practice extends into lineage, where the interweaving of human and natural histories shapes values through memory, ritual, and care. Beading, introduced to Indonesia through trade with China and India, exemplifies this dynamic. Incorporated into ceremonial garments and ritual objects, beads signify lineage and belonging. As they circulate between communities, they carry histories of exchange and adaptation, functioning as an archive of cultural negotiations.
Plants are another form of living archive. I draw on plant species native to Southeast Asia because they hold layered meanings: they are ecological entities, repositories of personal memories tied to my family and homeland, 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 micro and macro scales.
Alongside craft and ecological materials, I incorporate electronic components such as microcontrollers, pumps, motors, and sensors to create systems that blur the boundaries between human bodies, natural processes, and technological structures. My recent work engages automata, objects that mimic lifelike behavior while remaining fundamentally dependent on technological mediation. By foregrounding electronics, the work reflects on how machinery has historically been used to enable, manipulate, or withhold vitality. These assemblages function as complex networks that interrogate how technology shapes our relationships 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.