Jane Human
Jane Human is a British painter and printmaker. Originally from the Fens, she lives and works in rural East Anglia. A graduate of the University of Brighton, she spent years in London working as a freelance illustrator and artist for design agencies and publishers, and later held academic posts including Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge School of Art) and the University of Northumbria, alongside guest lecturing at the universities of Bath, Wolverhampton and Brighton and at Savannah College of Art and Design in the USA. Her work has been selected for national exhibitions including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Society of British Artists, ING Discerning Eye, the Originals National Print Exhibition and the Society of Women Artists (Mall Galleries); she was shortlisted for the CCA Galleries Emerging Artist award and the Sir John Hurt Award (Holt Art Projects), and exhibited as a guest artist with the Arborealists at Gallery East and The Minories, Colchester. She shows with Bircham Gallery (Holt, Norfolk) and Gallery East (Woodbridge), and is a member of Colchester Art Society. Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections in the UK, Europe, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.
Artist Statement
My main preoccupation is that of an observer of nature, both wild and cultivated and the landscape surrounding me in rural Suffolk - those often inconsequential territories of big agriculture, ancient scrappy hedges and unexpected dark ponds. I'm interested in horizons, and structure, and colour as a signifier of the moment.
I'm currently working on a series of works about the lone sentinel oaks which punctuate the field margins and rise high above the fields. These sculpted forms are part of the visual vernacular of Suffolk and speak to me of history of place, the passing of time and of home.
They stand testament to survival against all the odds; usually self seeded, battered by the east winds and their limbs severed by machinery.
In very close proximity to intensive farming, and colonised by the ivies which make their form so distinct, the oaks provide an extraordinary habitat for so many other smaller species of plants, insects and birds.
I would describe my working methods as a hybrid of painting and printmaking.
The process of making, both physical and material is important to me, and mark-making is key, intended to allude to, to abstract and to amplify the subject. There is a seductive tension between the gestural painterly marks made and the very graphic result when mediated via the mechanics and pressure of the large offset litho press I use to make these works on paper.
They are constructions, tapestries almost, created from many layers of transferred marks over significant numbers of weeks or months until both surface and subject have equal significance.