Jane Hughes 

Drawings & Paintings Tuck In Leave it out It's Curtains Wait there Birds of a feather And all the pretty maids are fit to be seen Desert In the Long Run Un-Veiled - series Dirty Work Special Days - Tryptich immaculate Conception - series Letters from America - series No Man's Land - series Holiday Haunts Unfinished Still - series Dolls House The Couches Labour Dispute Girls II The Contract Girls

Tuck in Tuck in. 2025. 50 x 50 cm. Oil on canvas

Leave it Out

Wait there (2025)

It's Curtains

Special Days (2024) The Scream - 200 x 100 cm. Oil on canvas 2024 Sliced - 200 x 100 cm. Oil on Canvas 2024 Big Day - 200 x 100 cm. Oil on canvas 2024

Girls II 90 x 60 cm Acrylic on Canvas 2023

Artist Statement Jane Hughes is a mixed-media artist whose primary focus is on painting. She reclaims and reframes the tradition of historical painting and grand narratives by putting the eclipsed, obscured, or erased wives of the ‘great and the good’ into the picture frame, posing political questions about ‘history’, representation and what stories get told. Painted from her imagination but informed by text and artefacts, Jane’s paintings reference the language of film. They are presented as a series or in a set of sequences; each frame fixes on a close-up or cropped image of a singular part of a woman’s body or face to build the narrative. They range in scale from the small and intimate to the large and voyeuristic. Jane’s paintings are passionate and narrative-driven. In telling the stories of women as wives, from the fragment’s history has left us, she reveals uncomfortable tales of emotional and physical pain. In the telling of individual stories, the paintings direct our attention to consider where power resides and who has agency. She paints in both oil and acrylic on Gesso Boards and on canvas. Decisions are determined by the aesthetic she wishes to achieve. Taking visual cues from historical eras, she stages each painting to create the Mis-en-scene and make clear where the thinking needs to be. Her use of paint ranges from a hazy, washed-out palette, where the colour is desaturated to give us a sense of women who are barely visible, to bolder portrait paintings, which use chiaroscuro for dramatic effect.

Dirty Work 187 x 93 cm paper, photo transfer, ink and charcoal, 2024 Exploring landscape as an expression of visual appropriation, particularity and marked by inequalities of power, Jane utilises the concept of the school chart, established as a system of understanding the world to challenge rooted notions of order and knowledge. Current conventional discourse implies that the withdrawal of colonial powers has enabled the global economy to function as a meritocracy, but patterns of appropriation continue to a devastating degree. Today, the world’s most popular household companies sell products tainted by forced child labour, but the disconnect between maker and user has made the labour of these 168 million children invisible. Using individual phototransfers taken from a 1960s geography schoolbook and displayed in an infographic format, Jane highlights how information, as fact, is laden with subjective views of the world, which is in a constant flux. Accompanying each phototransfer are charcoal and ink drawings of children at play with items produced by child labour, which draws attention to this disconnect. Exploring landscape as an expression of visual appropriation, particularity and marked by inequalities of power, Jane utilises the concept of the school chart, established as a system of understanding the world to challenge rooted notions of order and knowledge. Current conventional discourse implies that the withdrawal of colonial powers has enabled the global economy to function as a meritocracy, but patterns of appropriation continue to a devastating degree. Today, the world’s most popular household companies sell products tainted by forced child labour, but the disconnect between maker and user has made the labour of these 168 million children invisible. Using individual phototransfers taken from a 1960s geography schoolbook and displayed in an infographic format, Jane highlights how information, as fact, is laden with subjective views of the world, which is in a constant flux. Accompanying each phototransfer are charcoal and ink drawings of children at play with items produced by child labour, which draws attention to this disconnect.

Dolls House Acrylic on unstretched canvas 2m x 2m. Blanket and dolls incorporated into the painting, extending off the surface of the canvas. Sound piece to accompany.

Holiday Haunts Acrylic 162 x 100 cms on canvas (2022) (sold) Richter spoke of the family photograph as being in a particular class –a snapshot, an icon for the contemplation of and futile battle against mortality. It is traditionally constructed in a chronological and cyclical repetitions, of births, christenings and holidays. ‘The family is making itself through image’. But all these occasions are distinguished by ‘pleasure, happy beginnings, happy middles, but there must not be endings’ The overarching message is ‘We will be happy’ (Annette Kuhn 2002, p 23) It is the performance and contrivance in the family album which I probe using my own family archive - producing a sense of disquiet, a sense of something not being quite as it should be, a glimpse at what is not quite visible in these choreographed poses