Jane Hughes 

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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.