BORDERLANDS
Paintings exploring coast and field margins exhibited at The North Wall Gallery.
Open over 3 weeks, 10th-27th May. (Open Sunday 21st May).
10am-4pm (Sat and Sun 21st 12pm-4pm)
You may contact me personally via Instagram or my website - https://www.janestrother.co.uk. I will be available in the gallery at times to show you around.

‘Borderland’ refers to land boundaries on a human walking scale; a stretch of coastline or field margins, travelled and pondered. As a keen walker of cliff top, shore, mudflats or strand, Jane Strother explores landscapes, noting the shape of the land, marks of human activity or intervention, evidence of changing use.
Subjects are rooted in these landscapes, including the south west coast path of Devon and Cornwall, extensive areas of fringing salt marshes or defensive embankments built to deter both the sea and invaders, in Essex. Some of the selected work exhibited is from an ongoing series of work, ‘Beating the Bounds’ which refers to the peripheral extremities of Jane’s physical world in much of 2020. For those of you who know the east side of Oxford, this includes Shotover Hill, Littleworth, Wheatley and Horspath.
Collecting imagery from observation, whether by drawing or photography is an important part of her practice in order to capture an inherent ‘truth’, fundamental to painting in the studio.
Currently, the recording process involves making quick line or shape drawings while on the move, on small, loose pieces of paper or taking photographs, as an aide memoir to the terrain, redolent of its working or signifying habitat. Selections from this ‘notebook’ form an integral part in the building of a new ‘space’ on the canvas.
The decision making is visible, the process is seen, the handling of the materials and media is part of the object being made. The final image is mediated through aesthetic considerations of composition, colour proportion, value relationships and the quality of mark and its location, resulting in degrees of abstraction always with an adherence to the original truth. Questions are examined through an informed process of adding, altering, removing. Each change, which can mean switching and turning panels from one side to another is made in relation to the context, the painting as an object, to which the subject embedded in the selections made from the notebook, gradually becomes ancillary.