Jane is an artist, writer and scholar. . She writes and makes art in international artist/scholar collectives and has a studio practice as a painter. She paints as a means of expression and also as a method of inquiry. into her world. Her vocabulary of textures, marks, forms and colours, builds up in layers through a kind of conversation, or collaboration, between herself; the landscapes she inhabits and the materials she uses. She has an affinity with solitary, wild places.

Although she is interested in exploring the traces and marks that humans and others leave in the world but her paintings and prints contain only faint traces of human habitation- it is the layers beneath the surfaces of human habitation that particularly interest her. She lives and works in two contrasting environments: rural Wales and urban England and is interested in the ways that these contexts shape her work- particularly the interplay between colour and light .She is concerned with painting as a ‘thin place’, a portal to different ways of seeing, or a process of one thing becoming, or turning alchemically, into another. Her work is made as response to interconnecting layers of landscape, story, memory, material, traces of humans and other species, and other matters. She is particularly concerned by the stories evoked by different materials and their ancient and/or contemporary histories (such as gold leaf or iPad images).

Jane chooses her materials with care and uses sustainable (preferably locally resourced) methods and materials . She paints on canvas, wooden boards and handmade papers. Currently she is producing two parallel bodies of work: prints ( and cards) using iPad images and photographic collage methods on archival paper, and paintings on paper, board and canvas that often build up multiple layers on surfaces, and include much scraping, erasing, scratching and scouring.

Much of Jane’s work uses substances that carry with them an ancient history as art materials: raw, local pigments (ochres from Clearwell caves and inks fron Bideford in Devon, for instance and powdered Pembrokeshire slates and lichens); natural oils and waxes: gold and other leaves and organic mushroom and acorn inks from Cambrigeshire. She is aware of the ancient histories and ‘ghost presences’ that her materials bring to her work. (Blends of wax and pigment, for instance, were some of the earliest art materials ever used, included in Etruscan; ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek art). Jane delights in the juxtaposition of these ancient materials with her contemporary abstract paintings. The handmade oil paints she uses are produced organically and relatively locally by Michael Harding, whose workshops are in Cwmbran, South Wales, mid-way between Jane’s two homes. The gold leaf she uses is also resourced and produced ethically from conflict-free zones by the Manetti family, who have been supplying the art world with gold leaf from their series of state-of -the -art factories in Florence since 1600.