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 visual 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 9and vice-versa).. Both the landscapes she lives in have different elements and versions of a remoteness and bleakness (urban and rural) that fascinate her, and 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 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, cradled boards and handmade papers and often on/with photographs or digital images. She works with a wide range of materials including an iPad, eco-resins, raw local pigments, pastels, crayons, cold wax, graphite, gold leaf, collage papers, charcoal, acrylic 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 art materials: raw, local pigments (ochres from Clearwell caves for instance and powdered Pembrokeshire slates and lichens); natural oils and waxes: gold and other leaves and organic mushroom and acorn inks. 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 and ancient Egyptian art). She delights in the juxtaposition of these ancient materials with contemporary abstract paintings.