18th February – 21st March 2010 @ Otter Gallery
The Fallen House and Other Voices – a collaboration between painter Jayne Sandys-Renton and poet Stephanie Norgate.
In 2008 Jayne began studying the contemporary American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) whose self-portraits reflect a growing bodily awareness and sexuality mixed with spirituality and innocence, within formal compositions that are direct yet enormously subtle. Jayne produced paintings that were a conversation, or even collaboration, with this young artist who she’d never met. The work has many compositional similarities, but there it stops, as Jayne used Woodman’s images to investigate a broader sense of the environment and womanhood.
In 2009 Jayne has been developing a new theme in the work – space. This was introduced when she started to collaborate with the poet Stephanie Norgate, and began to place figures within the buildings and spaces that they’d visited. One such space is a Runcton folly tower, on a hill near Funtington, a space that has an eerie atmosphere combined with a real sense of history. Sometimes Jayne would include lines from Stephanie’s poems, making the work conversational as well as introspective.
The most recent of Jayne’s works come from photos taken in a French forest that had been stripped bare by a forest fire. This was an extraordinary place made of charcoal; and within it is a young woman, looking white and vulnerable as she moves and merges with the charred fir trees. Through expressive line (including lots of charcoal) and texture, these paintings investigate the relationship between this extraordinary space and this young woman.
