Gallery

‘Portraits of Us’

Two boxes, one contains 42 old black and white photographs, dating from 1890 to 1973. Each a portrait of someone. The second box contains 500 vintage envelopes, dating from 1948 to 2004, all addressed to the same two people.

Paintings from the portrait began and developed into Mail Art on the envelopes. The contents of the two boxes became connected.

Nine descriptions of 9 strangers:

1. There was a sly light, on this fifty-year night. From a spinning world, she rested on a cliff top, and captured rivulets of sound and reduced her voice, while darkness brought ice to her hair. She felt a pang for Earth. ‘I shouldn’t mix myself up, I won’t watch the future tumble, I can be careless with joy. This will be the geometry of my pursuit’. She recharged her memory.

2. They gaze into my eyes, see life at my gate, but didn’t notice cold stone, blue granite flint, not my bare feet in soft air. You brushed passed me on dusty road, didn’t see the olive trees, all smoky pink and silvery green.

3. Holding the hand of the past, I swagger, inhale fumes, pause in the shade and shadow, deep lines circle my eyes. On this day you see me as snow, as ivory, stone-cool, a polished pebble in black and white. You couldn’t see my mouth painted crimson-red.

4. I want an astronomer to look at this photograph of me, see my comet has two tails. One is dusty and white, leaves a trail that curves to fade. But my other tail blazes blue, is all electricity and charged gas molecules and is always right now.

5. The photographer made me look intensely lonely, forcefully isolated, snapped me as if some relic of weird architecture. Let me tell you, I don’t lay in disorder or find refuge in periphery, I am never entirely alone, I have muscular roots.

6. Over there I tend a garden, watch it grow, plant herbs to disorder, watch vapour rise from the trellis, catch soft rain drumming on the soil, kneel lightly on velveteen moss and remember that day when an orange tip landed on my palm….

7. On the day the photograph was taken, my life unfolded and wrinkled, and each wrinkle registered my existence. Here is me.

8. We exist in time, and we will not have time, quite soon. This photograph marks that moment. An image of life.

9. My photograph is a global picture. How happy to know that on opposites sides of the world art was being made.

‘Waste Not, Want Not’ Hereford Cathedral May 2023

Exhibition statement

When I was 16 I began to frequent charity shops every Saturday, after I finished washing pots in Mattie in Tissot café on Lord Street, Southport. With my wages in my hand, my eyes became honed to finding a ‘bargain, something interesting but useful, ‘trinkets’, sharks teeth, old cloth maps, postcard with beautifully written inscriptions, photograph albums, faded newspapers, old knitting patterns, postage stamps, wooden boxes and containers, jewellery to be dismantled, bundles of tangled embroidery thread, rusting kitchen utensils, enamelled lozenge tins with old metal buttons in them, musty hand-made lace, and of course books….. all useful stuff as I then enrolled into Southport Art College. But my first major and most treasured purchase was a 1940’s Singer sewing machine which I still use regularly and have never had to replace the needle. This charity shop habit persists and it’s difficult to pass by a charity shop if it’s open.

These were the description of my artwork, made of a period of years which supported the theme ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ – exhibits lent to be included in an exhibition alongside objects from the Hereford Cathedral collection:

Art in Boxes

‘Your Eyes Adjust’

‘Reeves Student Moist Water Colour Box’ (circa 1930), Batholomew’s map, vintage postage stamps, and text typed with my 1980’s typewriter

‘Travelling By Moonlight’

Wooden box (charity shop purchase) and old trinkets from jumble sales and book made from re-purposed paper

‘Now is the Time’

Re-purposed bed linen to make a stitched cloth book encased in an old wooden box

‘Find a Trace’

Re-purposed old book, pebbles, and shells from the Isle of Skye

‘A Box for Lost Words’

Sanded wooden shapes (charity shop, from a box of children’s toys), pebbles from Abereiddy Beach, Pembrokeshire

BookArt

‘Breathing In’

Re-purposed charity shop book, filled with paintings inspired by museum visits

‘A Line Scratched in Soot’

Charity shop book, all words and images inspired from 4-month informal residency in Hellens Manor gardens.

‘Flying to Nowhere’

Charity shop book, my images constructed from maps, black-out poetry, postage stamps, old music scores, recycled newspaper, stitched parts using my 1940 singer sewing machine.

New Year 2023….

Changing my walking habits to now include new and regular rail adventures have changed my view. A train journey to Abergavenny led to working in the first of several ‘board books’ an alternative to a traditional sketchbook (from charity shop finds). Each page described a wintery grey dreak memory snapshot from the train window, translated in the studio into painting on prepared collaged papers.

The second board book was stimulated by going to Llandudno for a ‘day trip’. My words frozen amongst abstracted images, working on ‘found’ paper, with additional inks and bleached out areas and text. A cool and almost colourless book which captures the mood of mid-February.

These invariably led to a much deeper exploration of how to describe atmospheric attitudes, through heavy use of fragile painted lines and disposed shapes. I never underestimate using instinct to guide me through a creative process, sometimes with absolutely no idea of where or why I am heading, but managing to achieve a newness which can then be harnessed and developed.

Running concurrently are the first tentative steps, drawing plants – mono-printing onto coffee-stained paper. Each botanical study combines information, from several sources, using a collection of old books I have about ‘herbals’. From each book, the description of the healing property of plants, somewhat surprised me, as from each source the ‘medical’ properties that a plant offers conflicting information, which could heal you or potentially finish you off!

The Season of Change (autumn into winter 2022)

It was with some surprise and gratitude that I was awarded First Prize in the h.Art Open Competition (Herefordshire Art Week) September 2022. Part of the prize was to exhibit my paintings in the Old Mayor’s Parlour, Church Street, Herefordshire. This is an exquisite 15^th century room, with the original carvings along the ceiling still intact. The exhibition was on for the duration of September 2022 and gave me opportunity to meet and discuss my paintings with numerous people. Exhibiting work is odd, there can almost be too much expectation heaped upon it, what the response might be, if people are interested in buying work, you are exposing yourself to an unknown audience. What I do understand is that the making of work is about a commitment to exploring and developing a visual langue, based on intuition and a curiosity about the world around you and your inner connection to that world.

The exhibition gently drew a line under the ‘walking-landscapes’ series, produced over the past year, because other ideas, including the use of asemic text and the figure in motion began to emerge, as a response to the physical activity of walking and looking. The complexity of mark making, and the merging of foreground and background continues, and somewhere in there is an invisible and private space where the meaning of art shivers. This current direction is being created in hand made mono-printed sketchbooks before working the figures into each double-page spread. The asemic text is also being worked into a separate ‘junk journal book’ made from repurposed paper (music manuscripts, very old encyclopaedia’s, ledgers etc). I’m waiting to see if these two elements feel like being combined.

The Year of the Tiger 2022

The year swirled in with storms, three preceding one another and the world felt churned up.

Indeed, everything has been thrown up in the air, as one man invades another’s people’s country.

With my regular longer walks postponed as muddy paths and strong winds made walking hazardous, shorter walks took me to familiar landscape, though now changed as trees had fallen.

A hike up towards Petty France gave a good view of the approaching weather, and the skies across the Malvern Hills seemed as churned up as the recently ploughed red soiled fields.

Out again and the path shadowing the edge of woodland towards Oyster Hill Coppice offered the last of wintery trees, bending and spiky with crows messing about in the sky, lit against lilac/orange skies. Winter at its best, strong light and low shadows.

On a later excursion Dumbleton Woods seemed to expose single trees, isolated and viewed as simplified formal tree-shapes to be remembered and worked from. This painting became a battle to keep it simple.

The wall along Hope End saw trees begin to resemble the warmth of spring returning, buds and blossom emerge and certainly it was a noisier walk as birds were in full throated singing mode darting through the woods.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

‘Beyond the Path’ (2021)

Just beyond, are tracks and paths that crisscross up into woods and orchards and farmland. Walking, looking and listening, smelling and touching, the space to experience an elemental and meditative connection to the landscape. This is where I am right now as the second year of covid-19 swirls around and I spend more time walking outside, experiencing nature and the seasons, and then back at home painting in my studio. Gouache, the richness and chalkiness of Windsor and Newton, a favourite paint, providing strong colours and a matt surface. Embedded into each picture is a memory of a place, making patterns and layering images together from a 3 or 4 hour walk.

Within this process new ideas and themes are emerging, how to fully connect an experience, which then leads to making a painting; the interconnectivity of creating, sensory memory, poetic words, cultural landscapes and the undiscovered.

A Tangle of Botanicals

‘A Tangle of Botanicals’ marked the year by painting plant forms inspired from looking at embroidered fabrics. 2020 was the year when we were unable to visit museum collections, so Jeanette scoured her books and fabric samples, interested in the marks needle and thread make in cloth, the stylisation and decoration of intertwined plant forms that other designers have found. She used this as a springboard to interpret embroidered surfaces and explore new colour palettes. “Each painting in some way is random, like walking in the local landscape, taking a different route each time. Not knowing is important, it’s how we continually learn. Submerging real plants with imagined ones, trying unusual colour combinations, and mixing different paints and inks into each picture to add a vibrancy or dullness”.