Jackson’s works utilize a familiar iconography - images such as the geodesic structures of Buckminster Fuller, mankind’s first steps on the moon, and the covers of Life magazine from the 1960s and 1970s - and references from art history. Materials he employs have included scorched wood, molten lead, mother-of-pearl, precious metals, formica, and found objects such as worn T-shirts, prosthetic limbs, axe handles and posters.

The critic Jeffrey Kastner has noted that his works locate ‘startling beauty in their counterintuitive material juxtapositions.’ However, for Jackson beauty is frequently partnered by desolation. His work explores a concept that he terms ‘the Horriful’, the belief that everything one does has the potential to bring both beauty and horror.