Craft Council of British Columbia

A textile artist and a poet come together in an exhibition based on friendship and mutual appreciation; one medium sparks the other in a confluence of ideas and inspiration.

The artist find herself revisiting themes of femaleness and autonomy through mythology, narrative, figurative exploration or abstract expression. Decades of friendship and artistic expression have allowed her to persevere in the face of heartbreak, hopelessness and rage.

Jane has been making, destroying and remaking her artworks for decades. Recent work with recycled clothing feels like a further exploration of the permanence/impermanence of materials, perhaps an attempt to salvage their usefulness for her. Our domestic cloth, be it clothing, or other household fabrics, eventually makes its way to the landfills, where it slowly disintegrates and returns to the earth, or not. Working with these frail, worn-out textiles, Jane, feels like a tender gift, an opportunity to rediscover their marks, shapes, and stories, perhaps creating new histories and future possibilities.

The Skin Series was begun early in the pandemic during a year of uncertainty when physical vulnerability and human resilience went hand-in-hand. Jude Neale’s stream-of-consciousness poem, Where We Stood, provided the impetus for this ongoing body of Jane’s work about our journeys – those hundreds of conversations that have occurred over the years between two women, mothers, poets and artists.

Through this exhibition, these two artists aim to share the methods and means of artist and writer working together, both sustaining work over a long period in productive collaboration and coming together to focus the working collaboration for exhibition; in other words, to speak the language of that communication fluently.