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. Herl vocabulary of textures, marks, forms and colours, builds up through a kind of conversation, or collaboration, between herself; the landscapes she inhabits and the materials she uses.

Her work is concerned more with what her paintings do and how they are made and behave in the world than with her own intentions as an artist, although she is also interested in exploring the traces and marks that humans and others leave in the world (and vice-versa). She lives and works in two contrasting environments: rural Wales and urban England, and has travelled extensively for her work, particularly, to Australia and North America. She is interested in the ways that these contexts and cultures shape her work (and vice-versa).. Both the landscapes she lives in offer different elements that influence the interplay of colour and light in her work. .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 landscapes, stories, memories, materials, traces of humans and other species, and other matters. She is particularly motivated by the responses her paintings evoke in the people who view them, especially the different relationships and stories evoked by different materials and their ancient and/or contemporary histories (such as gold leaf or iPad images).

Jane makes inquiries into her world via painting. She chooses sustainable, (preferably locally resourced) methods and materials . She paints on canvas, wooden boards and handmade papers. She works with a wide range of materials including an iPad, photographic images, eco-resins, raw local pigments, pastels, crayons, cold wax, graphite, gold leaf, collage papers, charcoals, inks and oil paints. Jane’s work ioften nvolves the build up of many material layers on surfaces, and includes much scraping, erasing, scratching and scouring.

Much of Jane’s work uses substances that carry with them an ancient history as sustainable, local 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 very 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). She 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.