From a young age, I loved making things, exploring materials and sometimes transforming whole environments.

 

At the age of 8, I lined a stick hut I found at the bottom of my primary school garden with soft green moss, changing the smell, texture, colour and atmosphere of the space once inside. I felt good in there.

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At the same time there occurred in Wales what was known as the Aberfan Disaster where, after torrential rain, a colliery slag heap slid down onto the village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults. In order to raise money to help the families, we brought in to school our used milk bottle tops ( in those days milk was delivered to the doorstep, bottles sealed with foil tops – gold for full fat and silver for skimmed) We squashed together the foil to create a ball, every day the ball grew bigger and became heavier – it was in the hall of our school – and finally it was sold for scrap metal.

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The transformation of these small objects into a big ball fascinated me, I don’t suppose that we raised much money, but it sealed this event in my memory. I had become unconsciously aware of the visual power of transforming objects…

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Now, after 40 years of working with volume,  particularly clay,  I am growing ever closer to allowing my body, my mind and the material to work together, in tandem, without one area dominating another. I have benefited over the years from the practice of yoga and realised that the skin on my body is a connected sheet and that a manipulation in one part of the body affects the whole, that the skin is the membrane that contains us and is in contact with the outside world. In my recent clay sculptures, I explore this relationship between my internal and external worlds and my struggle to find a balance; I believe that through this search for reconciliation, the personal becomes political.

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I manipulate large slabs of clay using my whole body, pushing the material from the inside out, transforming the walls of my pieces into a sensitive skin and giving the sculptures an abstract form that is both familiar and strange. I work while the clay is still wet, so that the pieces retain a soft, fluid appearance. The sculptures curl and expand around a central opening, as if breathing in and out, generating their own dynamic through this vital passage.

 

Working on a bigger scale, as in Walking Skins 2023, amplifies the movements provoked by the manipulations of the malleable sheets of clay, and provides the opportunity for the wave of the motion to develop. By hand building onto the emerging forms and following the initial momentums, I allow the undulations to grow into larger and more unexpected shapes. I often work the pieces upside down and do not see the finished piece until I turn them over at the end of the process; this way the clay offers me surprises I could not have imagined or consciously created. I set them on the ground, where they touch lightly, as if ready to walk away. It requires the removal of water, by drying, and a passage through fire, to fossilize them in their fluid action.

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In these biomorphic, sentient sculptures I seek to reach something quite archaic, unnameable perhaps, an expression of fluidity, a reminder that we once emerged from the sea and are still mostly liquid, remaining in constant motion. My installation and performance work are also guided by this notion; we find it in the waves of the sea, but also, on a much longer and infinitesimal scale, by the creation of earth itself, ground down from rocks and carried by water to be deposited. This was the starting point for Flux d’Argiles, a solo installation at the Grange Dimière in 2021, where I contrasted the movement of liquid clay flowing vertically under gravity, captured on six large suspended cloths, with 27 more sedentary fired sculptures, lying horizontally on the floor.

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I often use earth dug locally to create installations that are specific to the nature, archaeology, architecture or history of place such as Timelines at the Archaeological Museum of Bibracte, FR 2017 which used raw clay from the Landes whose plasticity was adapted for the Queule sculptures, inspired by the extraordinary beech trees on the site. Or for Watching Mud Dry, at the tap factory of Usine Danfoss Socla, 71, FR, 2015, where I found clay on a local building site that happened to be adjacent to a disused tile works, and small hay bales that I bought from a local farmer, used to build the structure.

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I have shared my passion with many others, in numerable workshop contexts, talks, symposiums, and more – it is rare the person that doesn’t like squeezing a fistful of clay or placing their hand in a bucket of kaolin slip.

 

Jane’s work is very visceral. to be its physical presence is to know its scale and sense its weight in relationship to oneself. We trace its shapes and surfaces from every angle, we feel their volume and infer their interiority making our own unmediated exploration, which in turn draws forth dark memories, into the light of consciousness, like water from a well. They seem to retain a wonder at what clay can be, but with an authority that comes with years of practice and undiminished curiosity.

Sebastian Blackie, writer, artist and emeritus professor of Derby University, UK