Jane Hughes
Portfolio of Recent Work
Come Hither
This overarching title of these recent paintings reflects the weight of societal expectations on women to be desirable. The women in these paintings are in the bedroom, some in revealing clothes with gestures which could imply sexual availability, but their expressions cannot be misread. They are not prizes to be passed around, and they will not be weighed down
Tuck In. 2025. 50x50 cm oil on canvas
Wait there. 2025. 50x50cm oil on canvas
Leave it out. 2025. 70x70cm oil on canvas
It's Curtains. 2025. 90x90cm oil on canvas
Between the Acts​
Throughout 2024, each artist in my Fold Collective was invited to make work in response to the idea of an ordinary domestic shelf (approx. 60x20cm) and write a short artist text to accompany it. Every month, a different shelf was discussed at the group crit.
The shelf I made was in the fashion of the theatre of the baroque, setting out a pastoral scene where the figure was used to maximise drama. Made from a piece of thin copper sheeting, the shelf is held up by two weathered iron supports. It nevertheless almost imperceptibly bows with the weight of the cornucopia upon its surface.
A mise en scene of ‘wedded bliss’ and the spectacle of marriage. Mirrors, clouded glass, broken cherubs and figurine lovers adorn the surface, while chains and archaic objects weigh it down. The Marriage ceremony mirroring theatre. Both are performances with scripts, costumes, an audience and dialogues in which the leading characters must play new roles in the ‘production’.
Giant’, ‘Amazon,’ Queen of the terrors’; newspaper headlines salivated over Alice Diamond, working class leader of a notorious, all-female gang of women thieves who lived and operated around Lambeth during the 1920s. Dressed like a film star, Alice drove a black Cadillac and wore diamonds on her fingers.
My research has centred on the historical context in which the gang operated - a period where to covet was normalised, but opportunities were few -, the ‘othering’ of female gangs as ideologically male while sensationalising their femininity, and the absence of females in the genre of the gangster movie.
Responding to a quote about Alice, ‘Biggest woman you ever did see’, my main work is a 4-meter-high drawing of Alice celebrating her gravitas as ‘Queen’ while also melodramatising her in the style of the gangster film poster. Reflecting both on the absence of women in film and social anxieties about women misbehaving.
The Triptych is painted on a discarded wallpaper trestle table. The focus is on the place of artifice. The mask of make-up and how beauty products are adopted as tools of conformity, in which ideals and concepts of ‘perfect’ femininity are actualised.
The Elephants in the room
The Elephants in the Room responds to ‘The Forty Elephants’: an all-female gang of thieves who operated across South London during the 20th century. An Aesop’s fable is used in the first scene to explore the elephants in the context of the patriarchy and the emergence of modern capitalism. In the second scene, archival footage is edited into a collage which compares and contrasts the lives of women from different social classes and how female violence is portrayed on-screen; specifically in the genre of the gangster film. The final scene incorporates the