Valda Jackson is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, and a writer. Valda explores the psychology of migration, identity, and loss. She makes work about our human existence and survival – themes which extend themselves into her public art commissions.
Designer of the Royal Mint coin commemorating the 75th anniversary of Windrush generations, released in 2023, Valda was also shortlisted for the prestigious National Windrush Monument commission in 2021. Her large-scale billboard, Still Holding On (3), commissioned by the RWA, Bristol, was exhibited in the Arts Council, Collection Exhibition: Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City 2023.
Valda’s untitled manuscript, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Bath Spa Prize 2021 by Janklow & Nesbit. She is a Hawthornden Literary Fellow – with short stories appearing in anthologies including The Book of Bristol, Comma Press (2023), online MMXX, Bath Spa University (2022), The Peepal Tree Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2018), Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories (Peepal Tree Press 2015).
Valda’s long-term collaborative public art practice, Jackson and Harris, is currently commissioned by Peabody at St Johns Hill in Clapham, London, for a series of public sculptures integrated into the architecture. Phase one, completed in 2017 won the Public Sculpture and Statues Association (PSSA) Marsh award for excellence in public sculpture.
www.valdajackson.co.uk