Jane Hughes
Exhibitions and proposals
Crit and Reflections on
For the MA Summer show, I submitted eight small oil paintings. Seven of them measured 24.5 x 24.5, and one was 12 x 4 cm. They were gesso panels with a depth of between 2 and 3 cm. I also hung a larger acrylic painting of 120 x 120. All of these works were in response to my research into the life of Sabrina Sidney, who aged 12, had been unlawfully taken by Thomas Day.
There is a gallery of the paintings in situ and in close-up. descriptions of the process leading up to the exhibition and how it was received and marketed. There is a link to my ‘working in the studio’ page tracing the development of this work.
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The critique which followed the MA show was constructive and positive. Reference was made to how I had explored a shift in scale in this work and how that changed the relationship to the subject. This impacted the decision to put some distance between the smaller series and my larger ‘Lover’s Eye’ painting. I had initially contemplated them sitting together, as can be seen by how I displayed them along the floor before they were hung., but in the discussion, I could see they worked better apart. It was clear they were painted by the same hand, but it allowed them to each speak to their strength.
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Geraint asked me whether I had intentionally created a polyptych, and I realised that was what I had created. Each of the paintings constituted a part of Sabrina as a whole person, although there was no central panel as such. I spoke of how the painting explored ideas around agency, who is in control and making this child visible. I was concerned that in cropping her into fragments, I was still also denying her. But I also wanted to emphasise this was precisely how she was perceived; her value was as a marionette to be manipulated at will.
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I thought it was interesting that I had, without consciously realising it, brought the language of film to bear in my paintings: the sequence, close-ups and cropping, walking away from the shot. This is a concurrent theme in my work. In other feedback comments, the smaller paintings were described as intimate, encouraging you to draw close, while the larger painting insisted that you step away.
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It was observed that my source for this set of paintings was text, which was a significant departure for me – a move away from the photograph as my primary source. This opened the discussion on how to bridge that relationship between image and narrative and how sound could be introduced to alter how an image is viewed. This then led directly to the conversation about the QR code.
I had inadvertently put the wrong QR code on the small labels which were to go beside my work – labels we all had been given. This was designed to take the user straight to the editing page of my website. I had confirmed with Anna in the days before that I needed to allow the ambiguity in my paintings to speak for themselves to trust in my work. I had written extensively about Sabrina in a blog which was on my platform, and so I satisfied myself that were people to access my website, they would find it – and now they couldn’t. My ill-considered solution was to put my large (nearly as large as my small paintings) business card up on the wall with a very large QR code. After a little teasing and ribbing, I agreed to take them down.
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I valued the feedback. I enjoyed hearing that the way the muted and desaturated colours I had used gave the feeling of something on the margins of not being quite there. I think the positioning of both sets of paintings worked well. The smaller ones felt harmonious with Lucrezia’s large paintings colour-wise but also in their content. I feel her women are often vulnerable and constrained within tight spaces, negotiating a place for themselves between the public and private. As such, they too, question who is in control. Alex’s painting on the other side also complimented the feeling at that end of the room. Huge paintings surrounded me, but I did not feel dwarfed. I felt the ‘Lover’s eye’ also fitted in with the other female artists at the further end of the room. It was between Xingxin and Breanne’s work, and although we look at women’s bodies in unique ways, we are all grappling with the female body as both subject and object in different ways.
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Kate and I got together to reflect on the MA show and the upcoming Research festival
Work leading up to show - link to ‘In my studio’
ADD Gallery images here and video
MA planning and execution
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Ideas for small works on display
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The period between the 5th of June and the install on the 26th was intense and although I was not part of the curating team I was so pleased to be placed in D207. It was a beautiful, cavernous room with a great light and I believed the selection of painters in there worked well
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Several changes were made in D207 during the next few days as we set up. . Yu Li and Qiaolin moved to a different studio, and Breanna moved her two large tapestry paintings into the space - one to the right of my ‘Lover’s Eye’ and one opposite. The paintings were now better spaced as they had initially felt too crowded. Alex was asked to edit his selection and to move some to the Wilson Road Exhibition.
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I had originally brought in 11 paintings, but the consensus seemed to be that I needed to remove the more whimsical paintings. It was a good decision. I had gone with the idea that numbers mattered, and it was liberating to find it was okay to ditch the ones which had caused me such angst at home.
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I was still at the stage of thinking about the wedding bouquet I had created to incorporate the token and the idea of the perfect wife. I had left it far too late, and although I loved making them, it was clear when I brought them in that they were a distraction and even a mistake.
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Various scenarios for my paintings before any decisions were made.
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LOTS OF IMAGES OF SETTING UP HERE
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The Change of heart
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IMAGES OF WEDDING BOQUET
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here is original diagram of room and text sent to grain. also proposal
Wilson Road
I invigilated down at Wilson Road for a couple of sessions where “Labour Dispute’ and ‘Cutting Board’ (an edited version) got their second outing. This show was an MA cross-pathway group show curated by Dan Howard-Birt. It was an interesting experience to see which works he felt went well together.
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I think there was quite a bit of confusion for visitors. I had friends who only went to Wilson Road on the night of the Private View, and then could not find the main MA show. Likewise, I knew people who felt it was too much to come to the main Camberwell site and then trek down to Wilson Road. The evening was hot and sticky, and wonderfully crowded.
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Marketing & Promotion
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LOTS OF IMAGES
After thoughts and where to next
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Following the show, I was lucky enough to get a week away in Italy, but on my return, I found out we needed to evacuate our house. The front bay of our house was coming away due to subsidence, and instead of the long summer I had envisaged thinking about where I would go next in Unit 3, I was instead trying to find alternative accommodation which would work for my disabled husband, and pack up 21 years of our belongings, arrange removal vans, and then having to unpack everything at the other end. I had seven weeks and just got consumed by this move and a third bout of COVID.. I don’t think I was being inefficient with my time or deliberately ignoring what I needed to do; time just got away with me.
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With the last few weeks left of the MA, I wanted to continue making paintings that would build on my work for the MA show. I thought of other child brides and was concerned to read the statistics of children, even in the US, who as young as 10 are married every year. This led me to think about the notion of ‘wifedom’ as a state. I read Ann Oakley’s ‘Forgotten Wives’ and researched the wives of supposed ‘renowned men’. I had found my topic – I was outraged that so many ‘worthies’ had eclipsed their wives, anonymised their presence or erased them from their lives. I was now passionately committed to producing their portraits, for their gaze to hold us in their grip.
Echoes
8-11th June 2023. 11 Avenue Studios, South Kensington
Press Release for Echoes
ECHOES
Echoes presents the work of three London-based artists working with family archives to launch enquiries into memory, belonging and forgotten histories. Engaging with personal photographs and inherited objects, their painting practices explore how dialogues with the past locate the artist in a space of shared cultural memory.
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Painting items discovered in her family basement, Maggie Shafran projects a desire for familial connection onto the inanimate, inventing a world where the lines between inheritance and appropriation are blurred. StevieRay Latham’s haunted images explore the disjuncture between memory & and history by using painting as an interface where photography and oral histories can coalesce. Jane Hughes’ work evokes Freudian concepts of the uncanny as the artist excavates a collection of photographs and films which had been hidden from her family for many years.
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Biographies:
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Maggie Shafran is an American artist residing in London completing her MA in painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Maggie’s practice examines her collection of thrifted and inherited items through an embodied approach to painting. Maggie received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College and a Graduate Diploma from RCA. Her artwork resides in prestigious collections throughout the US and in the UK and is represented by Gail Severn Gallery.
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Jane Hughes is a London-based contemporary artist. She is currently enrolled on an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Art having graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 2022. In her painting, Jane utilises her family photographic archive to interrogate the power that exists within the family dynamic and the authorship of memory. She has exhibited widely in the UK and her work is located in various private collections.
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StevieRay Latham is a South London-based artist and musician, currently studying for an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. StevieRay’s paintings combine family photographs and folkloric imagery to explore ideas of memory and remembrance. Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University in 2014, he has performed and exhibited around the world and his works hang in private and public collections across the UK.
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At the beginning of May and after our exhibition in Old Kent Road, Stevie-Ray Maggie and I got together to discuss putting together another exhibition with the three of us. We were all working with enquiries into memory, belonging and forgotten objects.
Maggie approached a contact she had who owned an incredible exhibition space in South Kensington to ask if they would be willing to let us use it. They were open to the idea, so as a first step, we went to an opening night of two artists using the space to see how it would work for us - it was great. The next steps were to identify a date for the show, design a poster, and write a paragraph about our work for a press release. Stevie-Ray was the expert at the posters and used one of Maggie’s paintings to great effect.
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There was no time for any of us to produce new work, so in consultation, we chose paintings, drawings and, in my case, a sculpture, which we felt complimented each other's work. I had my 11 drawings, which I had produced in Unit 1, ‘In the Long Run’. As they were charcoal on black paper, they were vulnerable to being erased, and so I investigated having them framed. I was naïve in my estimations of how much this would cost and the time the framer would need. With a limited budget, I chose instead to buy various mounting boards and a few frames to work out which looked best before settling on some mid-range black frames with 0ff- white mounting boards. I also produced an extra work to give a better sense of symmetry when they were hung.
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We began marketing through Instagram and word of mouth on the 30th of May. We took as much up as we could with us and dropped it off a the exhibition space on the fourth of June and began hanging the work over the next few days. We drew up a price list (which I found challenging) and printed it out for display when the show opened that night.
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The private view was well attended, and the feedback was positive – but none of us sold any work. We each took a turn to invigilate as we were only open for three days, but because the gallery was in a mews, tucked away from the main thoroughfare, there were very few visitors. We de-installed it on the Sunday.
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Overall, it was a very positive experience, and each time I get the opportunity to show my work in collaboration with other artists, I enjoy it more, I feel more relaxed about it and learn more about the process.
Convergence
17-20th October 2023. A-B Galleries, Camberwell Art College
On the 4th of October, Eleanor Street (MA Printing) approached me and asked me if I would be interested in putting some of my work in a group show she was organising with Carmen Van Huisstede (sculpture). The title of which was ‘Convergence’ and was due to open on the 19th of October at the A-B Gallery space in Camberwell. The artists were all women doing MA’s from across the different pathways.
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I was so pleased to be asked and to know that there was no pressure, we could reshow or repurpose older works. But as I had completed 7 of the portraits of forgotten wives, I was keen to show them. I shared the images with the group who felt they would work well in the exhibition.
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Eleanor and Carmen were just extraordinary in their organisation and in their curation. They were both keen to get the experience of managing an exhibition from start to finish and had already produced the press release. As the participating artists we just had to write a few lines about our work and deliver it to the A-B gallery on the 18th of October. Carmen and Eleanor then proceeded to paint the space, and together, they chose where to place the work. I could not have been more pleased with how they chose to display my paintings, and I liked the first names of each of the women being handwritten next to their portraits.
The private view was small and intimate but very supportive and enjoyable. It was illuminating to exhibit with artists I had only known tentatively beforehand and talk to them about their work and their experience of studying at Camberwell, plus their plans going forward. I appreciated how quickly you can respond to a request and how efficiently and calmly a show can be brought about.
Artists Showing
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Alexandra Diana Costea
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Emotion Etched: The Feel of Nature 2023 - Digital print on wallpaper and print-screen
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Alexandra is interested in creating artwork by combining photographs of natural scenery and printmaking to alleviate her anxious mind. She believes that nature has a therapeutic effect on the human brain. The artist uses natural landscapes to heal her mind and, in the process, to help others the same way it has helped her. Alexandra discovered the potential of healing through nature while dealing with her trauma and anxiety from when she was a sick child. Through drawing and printmaking, she wants to create compositions that can help people remember nature's potential for a stressed mind and body. At the same time, Alexandra hopes that her art immerses people in the same journey as her, the journey to heal and enjoy nature's beauty.
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Sofia Alrich Veytia
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Untitled 2023 - Hydro-coat etching on Hahnemühle paper 53 x 78c
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Sofia Alrich Veytia is a visual artist born in Mexico City, currently based in London. Her visual and theoretical research investigates the correspondence between spirituality, the natural realm, humanity, and the cosmos. She attempts to make substance of something that in its essence is transient, fleeting, or intangible, through amorphous figures that resemble the microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously. She is currently working mainly with intaglio printmaking, photography, and video as a means of thinking through an image in various steps, digitally manipulating the source material, dissecting it, and transforming it, wherein each mark diverges from the original source and intertwines with another.
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Jane Hughes
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No Man’s Land 2023 - 7 paintings, acrylic on gesso board - Virginia, Sylvia, Patricia, Mileva, Elsa, Catherine, Una
Jane’s practice explores ‘authority’, secrets and the obscured within the home through the mediums of paintings, film and installation. ‘No Man's Land’ is her series of portraits of some of history's forgotten wives. Women who, though married to renowned figures in the world of art, politics and science, have been anonymised, abandoned or erased from history. Psychologically powerful, these small-scale paintings force us to meet these women's intense and unflinching gaze and not turn away. By telling their stories Jane hopes to begin to open up the discourse on power as measured through absence and silence and make way for alternative histories to be told.
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Eleanor Street
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untitled 2023 - photo-emulsion on porcelain 5x7 cm
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Eleanor uses images of landscape to explore memory and the grief arising from the loss of both parents. Her work considers ways of navigating and containing unruly emotions and of attempting to capture and preserve particular moments spent in the landscape, in the face of fallible, fragile memory.
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Eleanor uses the idea of transitional objects to create tiny things which evoke or encapsulate something much larger; and describe intimate, personal emotions that also have universal salience. These two pieces use photographs taken by her father in Scotland nearly 30 years ago.
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Joy Stokes & Eleanor Street
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Dialectics of the Skin 2023
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Fluid Dynamic 2023
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Although Joy and Eleanor’s work differs conceptually, visually and methodologically, they have found a connection that has meant their interests and something have evolved in parallel, over the course of the MA.
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Dialectics of the Skin considers the paradox of the skin’s fragility in the context of lymphodema – needing regular heavy moisturisation with thick, greasy creams to prevent cracking and tearing – with its function as barrier between the body and world.
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Fluid Dynamics references the importance of water to our physical selves, as well as to our emotional being.
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Song Yuhuan
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Red 2023 - etchings on Somerset Satin paper
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Yuhuan uses abstraction to explore landscape as a metaphor for the female body. In her work, she reflects on her own experience and emotional expression as a woman. The red flowers and the ink-like horizon attempt to express the symbols of life force as women understand it and the personal experience of women’s existence.
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Joy Stokes
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etchings on Somerset Satin paper
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Carmen Van Huistedde
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porcelain
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Te Palandjian
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Garden Bed 2023 - Ink on starched paper
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Te Palandjian sculpts using the mark-making movements of digging. Her work, being as much about process as it is about materiality, attempts to transform naturally-sourced and man-made mediums—casting with them, compressing them, or revealing features of them—to uncover the critical role that materiality plays in the context of archaeology, landscape art, and the politics of the garden. By re-processing her materials over and over, from the primary holes she digs, to the tertiary, texturized and compressed paper cast of a plaster cast of that hole, the audience is pressed to analyse her initial digging action. Palandjian asks, what does it mean to study a dug artifact, as an archaeologist does, when the artifact is the hole itself? And thus, what happens when the phenomenology of hole-digging and the maker of the hole are the focus of analysis and critique?
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Plop
In August I was asked by Katherine Rose if I would like to exhibit with a group of women artists starting a second career in the arts. She had seen my work at the Bargehouse and at the MA show and wanted to know if I would be interested in being involved - which of course I was. They were a collective and had all exhibited together before.
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The proposal was written by Katherine Rose Chandler and included eight artists: Jess Blandford (painter), Bernadette Enright (sculpture), Francesca Guiliano (multi-disciplinary, Yasmin Noobakhsh (multi-disciplinary), Katherine Rose (film, performance and installation) , Maha Satish (painting) , Eleanor Street (printer).
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The Proposal submitted by Katherine on the 31st of August:
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Exhibition Concept: The Edge of Vastness
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I am proposing a collaborative exhibition celebrating women artists, who are over 40 years old and reclaiming (and re-evaluating) this golden age beyond traditional caring roles and first careers.
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Menopause defines this age for many women as a complete physical and emotional change. It was at this point when women were regularly committed to mental institutions during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to control and contain emotional outbreaks and non-conformity. Now there is a much greater understanding of the physical shift that happens, but we aren’t quite ready as a society to hear the potential wisdom and power of women seeing and feeling things differently. Suicide rates for women are still currently highest between 45 and 49 years (Ref: Samaritans) and many women still feel that their voices are silenced by lack of understanding and lack of support.
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As a collective, we believe that we need to challenge and alter the angle with which we view this chapter of life. We need to provide visible platforms for what is often ignored or unseen, to connect women and make space for exciting and powerful conversations and exchanges of ideas. We need to explore the lived relationships and experiences of this wise, fiery rage.
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My entry - with the intention of showing ‘Immaculate Conception’
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Jane Hughes’ practice explores “authority”, illusions and secrets within the family home through painting, film, and installation. Focused on the role of women now, but also from previous generations whose choices were limited by their gender, she uses the photographic image as the springboard to illuminate and explore the family, motherhood and children’s lack of agency, and invites the audience to critically think about what we think we see
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Sadly on the 4th of September, we heard our submission had not been accepted. We will continue to try and find a new venue and as a group resubmit the application where there are open calls.