Jane Griffiths – portfolio
Contact the artist
Exhibition information
In jewellery, I work mainly in sterling silver, with some copper and brass. In the past I was shy of precious and semi-precious stones, and worked entirely with sea-glass and china collected from beaches in Cornwall. I still use these, but I now also use semi-precious stones too. I also enjoy setting rough found stones alongside highly polished precious ones; I love the contrast. For the same reason, I’ve been using rich semi-precious beads in the same necklaces as pieces of found wood.
The style of my work is bold and tactile, and I enjoy contrasting textures and asymmetry, and I like the handmade nature of the pieces to be visible. This applies particularly to my necklaces: I make the chains for almost all of them entirely by hand, creating each link individually, so that no two are the same.
In painting, too, I enjoy texture and layering. I’m drawn to landscape and (especially) houses in landscape. Until recently, I worked mainly in acrylic and mixed media; over the last year, as a result of studying on the Porthmeor Programme at the St Ives School of Painting, I’ve also begun using oil and cold wax. Whatever medium I’m using, I inevitably create palimpsests, in which glimpses of earlier layers show through the later ones, as if painting the experience of seeing or remembering a place as well as the place itself.
Some of the techniques I used in bookbinding many years ago have proved useful in both painting and jewellery – in particular in the use of gold leaf. I’ve also been using fragments of paintings in jewellery: there are some brooches and pendants in this Artweeks exhibition that are made from studies of the old English Faculty Library in Oxford: a building I’ve known and periodically worked in since I was a student in the 1980s and 1990s, and which was decommissioned last year. This kind of cross-over is something I very much want to explore further.
Artist information
I originally trained and worked as a bookbinder, in London and then in Norfolk, until my studio became the casualty of an elaborate series of house moves, including to Oxford and later Chipping Norton. Several more moves later, in Bristol, I was able to start silversmithing classes – something I’d always wanted to try – and quickly became hooked, acquiring my own tools and turning a tiny single bedroom into a workspace. After returning to Oxfordshire I was for a while a member of the Church Lane Gallery in Banbury, and also sold my jewellery through Plum Gallery and the Banbury Museum Shop.
It was in Banbury, too, that I began painting for the first time as an adult; like many people, I stopped when in my teens and somehow didn’t dare start again. Finding the courage to join an evening class with Rachel Cronin was the beginning of something that has felt personally as well as artistically transformative, somewhere between rediscovering a lost language and discovering a new one. It has enabled me to respond to the landscapes that matter most to me, including those around Chipping Norton and in the far west of Cornwall, and to a series of houses that haunt my imagination – most importantly, my childhood home in Devon, which was recently demolished.
I have work in the Jane Adams Gallery in St Just, and have had paintings included in exhibitions at The House of Smalls in Edinburgh, the Heseltine Gallery in Middleton Cheney, and the Fronteer Gallery in Sheffield; earlier this year, I was part of a group show in the Kendrew Barn Gallery at St John’s College in Oxford. This is the first time I have included painting as well as jewellery in Oxfordshire Artweeks.
Jane Griffiths
