Jane is an artist, writer and scholar. . She is obsessed with colour. She frequently spends time out in wild isolated places (places that are increasingly difficult for her to get to) and then brings back sketches, photographs and memories to her studio(s). She is hoping for the invention of an inexpensive, stable, comfortable, genuinely all-terrain electric wheelchair.) Jane very much concurs with the North American painter Joan Mitchell who said ‘ I carry my landscapes around with me’ . Back in her studio it is remembered landscapes that Jane is painting, rather than copies of photographs and sketches - although her iPhone and sketchbooks often inform her work. She writes and makes art in international artist/scholar collectives and has a studio practice as a painter. She paints from the landscapes she carries around as a means of expression and also as a method of inquiry. Her vocabulary of textures, marks, forms and colours builds up in layers, as if in dialogue between herself; the landscapes and the materials she uses. She has an affinity with solitary, wild places and finds great solace in them. Although Jane is interested in exploring the traces and marks that humans leave in the world, her paintings and prints contain only faint and occasional traces of human habitation. The layers and colours beneath the surfaces of landscapes 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 and their colours shape her work. She is concerned with painting as a ‘thin place’, a portal to different ways of seeing beneath surfaces, or a process of one thing becoming, or turning alchemically, into another. Her work is made as textural, colour-laden response to interconnecting layers of landscape, story, memory, material, traces of humans and other species, and other matters. She is particularly fascinated by the ways in which different materials (such as gold leaf or iPad images) carry or evoke ancient and/or contemporary histories.

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:

1) prints ( and cards) using iPad images and photographic collage methods on archival paper, which tend to be produced in one fittings and

2) paintings on paper, board and canvas that often build up multiple layers of traditional materials on surfaces over time- sometimes over months or years- and include much scraping, erasing, scratching-out and and scouring, as well as the application of materials. .

Much of Jane’s work uses substances that carry with them an ancient history as art materials: raw, local pigments (ochres from Clearwell caves; inks fron Bideford in Devon; powdered Pembrokeshire slates and lichens ; natural oils and waxes and organic mushroom and acorn inks from Cambrigeshire. These materials bring ancient histories and ‘ghost presences’ to her work: Blends of wax and pigment were some of the earliest art materials ever used, included in Etruscan; ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek paintings and decoration (of houses and ships). The handmade oil paints and media she uses are produced organically and locally at Michael Harding’s Cwmbran workshops (midway between her two homes). The gold leaf she uses is 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. Jane delights in the juxtaposition of these ancient materials with her very contemporary paintings.