About Jayne Gaze

Event: Beneath the Surface

Dates: 9 Oct 2015 - 7 Nov 2015

An exhibition for World Mental Health Day by artists of the Art in Minds Foundation of which I am founder and Trustee.

Event: Finding Futures

Dates: 6 Oct 2014 - 24 Oct 2014

Finding Futures, the 11th exhibition of Art in Minds Foundation (www.artinminds.org.uk)

Event: Celebration

Dates: 23 Sep 2013 - 28 Oct 2013

This was the 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Art in Minds Foundation (www.artinminds.org.uk)

Event: Seeing in Colour

Dates: 1 Feb 2013 - 2 Mar 2013

To view images please visit the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/seeing-in-colour/

After sailing in the Western Isles of Scotland in the summer of 2012 I saw my world through fresh eyes and I could feel the colour seeping back into my soul.

The work is directly influenced by the play of light and colour on the movement of water, direct exposure to the elements in all weather conditions contrasting with calm and tranquillity and a visual ‘eclection’ of objects, colours and memories from around this spectacular coastline.

Event: Artist in Residence Exhibition

Dates: 3 Nov 2012 - 30 Nov 2012

For the month of November 2012 I was a guest Resident Artist in one of two studios set up in the Old Library Project Space and exhibited restrospective works, new work and work in progress.

Event: Open Exhibition

Dates: 10 Sep 2012 - 6 Oct 2012

An open exhibition organised by the Click Click Collective.

Event: Former Glory

Dates: 2 Jul 2012 - 7 Sep 2012

To view images please visit the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/former-glory/

In 2012, along with other members of the Enigma Group of Worcestershire Artists, I was invited to make new work in response to the upper rooms of Himley Hall in Dudley, not open to the public and untouched for decades. The outcome was Quintessence I, II and III.

“The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former”

I was born in my parents’ bedroom at Sheinwood Manor in Shropshire, a rambling, gracefully aging, Georgian farm house. The fabric of the building felt imbued with history, almost as though – if you were to peel back the tired wallpaper – you would see the very souls of the people who had lived there.

When I first visited Himley Hall it evoked memories of my childhood home and images of its fading beauty began to resonate in my work.

My aim was to explore these emotions and imbue each piece with fragility, atmosphere and intrigue. The result is a response, so subtle in parts, that it is barely a breath or a touch.

Event: Connections

Dates: 12 Mar 2011 - 7 May 2011

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/connections/

Connections was an exhibition brought together by myself and other members of the Enigma Alumini Group of Worcestershire Artists in 2009. My response was a series of ‘shrines’ utilizing recognisable images including The Kiss (Rodan).

Shrine: receptacle of sacred relics;chapel of special associations;hallowed by some memory

The making of shrines has long been part of the human experience. They date back to the beginning of recorded time and have been found almost everywhere in the world. They express the most basic human concerns, birth, life and death. A shrine was where people went to ask for help from greater unseen powers that governed their lives. Shrines gave tangible form to beliefs.

My box assemblages, inspired by the concept of the shrine, for me represented an inward journey of discovery, exploring feelings and memories. My aim was to imbue each one with history, emotion and intrigue.

I utilised family heirlooms, found, collected and constructed objects and ephemera.

Each told a personal story.

Event: Resident Artists Exhibition

Dates: 10 Jan 2011 - 11 Feb 2011

A collection of work by all those involved with Worcester Arts Workshop.

Event: Reflections 2

Dates: 1 Nov 2010 - 7 Nov 2010

Projected exhibition from an empty shop front in Worcester High Street.

Event: Connections

Dates: 5 Jul 2010 - 31 Jul 2010

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/connections/

Connections was an exhibition brought together by myself and other members of the Enigma Alumini Group of Worcestershire Artists in 2009. My response was a series of ‘shrines’ utilizing recognisable images including The Kiss (Rodan).

Shrine: receptacle of sacred relics;chapel of special associations;hallowed by some memory

The making of shrines has long been part of the human experience. They date back to the beginning of recorded time and have been found almost everywhere in the world. They express the most basic human concerns, birth, life and death. A shrine was where people went to ask for help from greater unseen powers that governed their lives. Shrines gave tangible form to beliefs.

My box assemblages, inspired by the concept of the shrine, for me represented an inward journey of discovery, exploring feelings and memories. My aim was to imbue each one with history, emotion and intrigue.

I utilised family heirlooms, found, collected and constructed objects and ephemera.

Each told a personal story.

Event: Worcester Open 2010

Dates: 24 Apr 2010 - 26 Jun 2010

Contemporary Open Exhibition.

Event: Connections

Dates: 7 Dec 2009 - 18 Dec 2009

Connections was an exhibition brought together by myself and other members of the Enigma Alumini Group of Worcestershire Artists in 2009. My response was a series of ‘shrines’ utilizing recognisable images including The Kiss (Rodan).

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/connections/

Shrine: receptacle of sacred relics;chapel of special associations;hallowed by some memory

The making of shrines has long been part of the human experience. They date back to the beginning of recorded time and have been found almost everywhere in the world. They express the most basic human concerns, birth, life and death. A shrine was where people went to ask for help from greater unseen powers that governed their lives. Shrines gave tangible form to beliefs.

My box assemblages, inspired by the concept of the shrine, for me represented an inward journey of discovery, exploring feelings and memories. My aim was to imbue each one with history, emotion and intrigue.

I utilised family heirlooms, found, collected and constructed objects and ephemera.

Each told a personal story.

Event: Reflections 1

Dates: 26 Oct 2009 - 31 Oct 2009

Projected exhibition from an empty shop front in Worcester High Street.

Event: Ten Threads

Dates: 6 Oct 2008 - 31 Oct 2008

The work of ten Worcestershire Artists exhibited in the South Cloister.

Event: Open Contemporary Exhibition

Dates: 7 Jul 2008 - 12 Jul 2008

An exhibition of work invited from Artists across Worcestershire in response to domestic abuse.

Event: Face Value

Dates: 29 Oct 2007 - 3 Nov 2007

Self Portrature Exhibition.

Self-portraits have been a method of self-exploration since humans first gazed at their own reflection in a pool of water. With the invention of the mirror came an even stronger fascination to capture one’s likeness. And even within the past ten years, the public’s fascination with the way an artist sees him/herself has led to exhibitions like the National Self-Portrait Collection in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Self-portraits, we have found, can be carefully staged to show the audience only what the artist wishes to project, or deeply revealing, inadvertently displaying feelings of anguish and pain. Self-portraits have been used to test new techniques, make a signature mark, launch into self-study, remember the past, and as a way to release emotion.

Whichever way artists choose to construct their images, they are each forced to study their own personas both physically and emotionally. What do artist’s find when they search the mirror? For some the self-portrait is cathartic experience, a letting go of pent-up emotions. For others, the process reveals new insights about themselves and their work. For all artists, the self-portrait is an exploration, an opportunity to see beyond the image in the mirror and begin to search into the soul.’

Event: Alumni Textiles Exhibition

Dates: 21 May 2007 - 28 May 2007

An exhibition of textile work by Worcester Alumni Artists exhibiting group Enigma to coincide with the 2007 Degree Show.

Event: Post Graduate Exhibition

Dates: 22 May 2006 - 29 May 2006

Exhibition staged by invitation of Post Graduates and Tutors Work to coincide with the Degree Show

Event: Stitched

Dates: 29 Apr 2006 - 26 May 2006

Textile exhibition

Event: Textures of Memory

Dates: 5 Nov 2005 - 23 Nov 2005

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/textures-of-memory/

During my residency at Worcester Cathedral I began to experiment with print. I was given the opportunity to develop this work during a year as AA2A Artist in Residence at Worcester University in 2004-2005
http://www.aa2a.org/artists/jayne_gaze

‘…Yet there is a space where small gestures slide into dreams, where the familiar turns. A place of quiet intensity. Where the textures of memory are smooth and white and velvet and blue. Where they absorb into linen and cotton and canvas and celluloid, are a mass of material, shadow and ghost, are as fine as hair, as ephemeral as light, as sharp as pins, as random as discarded thread. Where there is the will to repair and disrepair, to reveal and conceal, to caress and embrace, and to imagine and muse, and to invent and create and to remember and forget, and…’

Event: Textures of Memory

Dates: 10 May 2005 - 8 Jun 2005

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/textures-of-memory/

During my residency at Worcester Cathedral I began to experiment with print. I was given the opportunity to develop this work during a year as AA2A Artist in Residence at Worcester University in 2004-2005
http://www.aa2a.org/artists/jayne_gaze

‘…Yet there is a space where small gestures slide into dreams, where the familiar turns. A place of quiet intensity. Where the textures of memory are smooth and white and velvet and blue. Where they absorb into linen and cotton and canvas and celluloid, are a mass of material, shadow and ghost, are as fine as hair, as ephemeral as light, as sharp as pins, as random as discarded thread. Where there is the will to repair and disrepair, to reveal and conceal, to caress and embrace, and to imagine and muse, and to invent and create and to remember and forget, and…’

Event: Haven

Dates: 8 Sep 2004 - 14 Sep 2004

Haven Installation Art commissioned by English Heritage in association with Public Art Route for Heritage Open Days. A Public Art Route project in association with Eye Candy.

The Chapel was converted into a place of discovery and ideas where 10 artists presented their curious findings.

I was invited to exhibit with some wonderful artists and felt extremely humbled to be showing my work alongside one of my idols, Karen Truselle, who sadly died in 2008 at the age of 56 from breast cancer.

Event: Translations, Transfusions, Transfigurations

Dates: 16 Jul 2004 - 8 Aug 2004

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/translations-transfusions-transfigurations/

Artist In Residence Exhibition.

Essay by Lalitte Stolper, Research Fellow in Art, Worcester University.

A sacred building, amongst other things, is where the living go to come to terms with death. Worcester Cathedral, for all its grandeur, its royal tomb and aristocratic engravings, has always found place for less renowned incisions against mortality. A cockleshell pilgrim lies under a marked flagstone, and amongst the cathedral’s treasures, as carefully preserved as King John’s shroud, we find the flayed skin of a thief who tried to strip the building of its sanctus bell. Examine the walls: everyone in particular seems to have scratched their name, to tell us they were here, to turn a personal moment into public eternity.

The moment she enters the cathedral, the artist sees it as an inscribed – wounded – body. She projects onto it a personal body – that of her mother, who is dying. It is questionable to expose the private life behind the public artist – but impossible to explain these works without lifting that particular veil. Gaze translates, transfuses and transfigures her grief into art.

Translations [Dean’s Chapel, wall]

At first she keeps her distance. The stones are photographed, then replicated in layers of paper, glue and gritty carborundum. She digs into the surface for what is lost in this translation, but does not find all that she’s looking for.

Transfusions [Dean’s Chapel, wall]

She pares the newspapers of phrases she needs: “a study of loneliness, repression and destructive passion”. How much will she veil or unveil of mother’s control, her own resistance?

Mourning both their lives, she returns to childish things – gets glue all over her hands, lets it congeal and dry, then peels off see-through skin. She soaks bandages in oil and pigment. They darken and smell pungent, and she remembers the removal of dressings. She takes the newsprint parings and rolls them with the glue-skins in the bandages – tight, tighter. She tears a window in a painter’s canvas, like the Jewish mourner tearing his suit, and orders the scrolls inside. They are messages, sent but unopened. Still not satisfied, she oils more bandages and pleats them into parcels: dark little gifts to ornament a mantelpiece.

Transfigurations – [Dean’s Chapel, centre]

At last she breathes. The works become bigger than she is and rise off the ground. Each one opens around a space her own size: translucent; un-torn; hiding nothing. She wonders if she is empty now too.

She names the results of her labours as neutrally as she can, but they are still “very raw – the most real I’ve ever made.”

Event: Symbiont

Dates: 7 Jul 2003 - 1 Aug 2003

Video Instalation 'Symbiont' as part of Artery

Event: Chapters of the Self & Mnemosyne and Metaphor

Dates: 23 Jun 2003 - 26 Sep 2003

For images please follow the link below
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/chapters-of-the-self/
and
http://jaynegaze.com/gallery/mnemosyne-and-metaphor/

Final Degree Show Part 1. 'Chapters of the Self'. My initial inspiration came from a garment called a barrier, given to me by my mother. It had been worn by both of us, and darned and mended by both her and her mother (my nanna). The significance of this was echoed in the words I found written in my mother’s notebook that became both the catalyst and epitome of this project:

‘By starting each line in the thread above that in which the previous row finished, finishing in the thread below that in which it was begun’

Being perishable themselves the textiles and images provide only fragmentary evidence of each woman’s life. The lines of stitches, the binding, seams, patching and mending symbolic of textiles skills handed down through generations, manifested in this body of work, each chapter has to be ‘read’ in order to make sense of and understand the whole.

‘As cloth makes manifest deeply held cultural values that may otherwise be imperceptible – in fact it may be a woman’s very crucial job to translate these ephemeral values into material objects’. Generations and geographies in the visual arts.

Final Degree Show Part 2. ‘Mnemosyne and Metaphor’, is a response to a work by Caroline Barlett: ‘On the Shelves of Memory to Mnemosyne’ where hundreds of labels record the transition of the collected to the exhibited. It exploits the use of labelling to define physical and ethereal matter, presence and absence.

By researching both archaeological and museum systems of retrieving, recording and exhibiting I have produced a piece that reflects both. In the same way that fossils are the physical imprints of what has been and passed but shaped the world, so does thought and experience shape our lives and our identity. The memories of these are often boxed away in our minds, sometimes too painful to open. It is these thoughts and experiences that I exhibit by ‘opening the boxes’. I appropriated systems of archaeology and museology and utilise themes of metaphor.

Influenced by the work of Claudio Costa, ‘Anthological Ontology’, 1994 the pieces are almost entirely black to suggest the mind as the dark place where these memories are kept and concealed. The lids are all open; otherwise the contents could not be ‘seen’. The strength of the piece is in the labels, which are the only clues given to identify the ‘exhibits’.

In making the memories of thoughts and experiences ‘tangible’, by opening the boxes and publicly exhibiting them, they become something to deal with or respond to. Like real artefacts in a real museum you are invited to put them into their context, perhaps socially, culturally or historically but more probably personally, physically and emotionally and like real artefacts, in doing so try to make sense of ourselves.

“If you understand the parts of something you understand the whole”. Bridget Crump, curator of Worcester Museum and Art Gallery 2002

Event: Light

Dates: 19 May 2003 - 29 Aug 2003

Outdoor Sculptural Textiles Installation ‘Light’