ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice is within painting. I work on paintings and drawings with stitched seed / trade beads. This choice of medium is a response to both material culture encountered in museums, and a reaction to the pictorial assertions of western painting traditions. The beading evokes a desire for intimacy with the subject, focussing the image, and masking what lies underneath; accessing a pre-verbal experience of being-in-the-world. The works consider the space between processes. A personal iconography comes from my present life in a city, and my past experience of being a cultural outsider, living within fiercely defined notions of 'Welsh-ness'. The beads act both as an agent of translation for this imagery, as a dissonance, and as an other language. My work examines values attached to notions of skill and craft, within a tradition historically shut to such practices. Recent work in collage responds to 'object'; to collections of natural history, as well as objects encountered in the Museum of Things, Berlin, given new identities and iconography through their depiction. A comment by Lynne Cooke, discussing Rosemary Trockel, that 'artists might school museums' interests me in relation to my current subject, where images from a collection, a 'detachment of the human subject from the world that is the object of enquiry', is rendered transparently, 'as an ongoing relationship with components of the lived-in environment'.

'Jane Millar’s small paintings – quietly matter-of-fact when viewed from a distance- might have their origins in the imaginative tension between the frozen, flattened space of film stills and the endless unspooling of lived memory. Or else in those talismanic photographs we took long ago and can never quite bring ourselves to throw away – an exotic parrot, a woodland glade, and distant mountains. But the same paintings, seen close to, reveal intricately hand-stitched beading that mimics or counterpoints some section of what is represented through paint in another, altogether more immediately tactile, dimension. The cool, shiny mosaic-like qualities of a beaded surface that, despite its stylisation, can evoke the optical shimmer of light on a distant mountain where the passage of clouds animates rocky outcrops laced with snow. Elsewhere tiny clusters of beads, seen close to, take on the toxic colouring of pills, fragment the logic of the original image.’

Dr Iain Biggs, Head of Research, UWE Bristol. Catalogue for ‘So Near So Far’, 2007              

BIOGRAPHY

I studied painting at Canterbury College of Art, and then completed an MA in Painting (Tapestry) at the Royal College of Art, in 1989. I have since developed and established my studio practice, exhibiting widely in Britain and Europe, both in commercial and public gallery contexts. Alongside this, I have worked collaboratively with other artists and researchers, mainly in self-initiated projects. These have taken the form of artists' publications and events. As a studio artist my practice is well established but I wish to develop my exhibitions profile further. In the last three years I have created an established profile as a curator, with successful site-specific projects such as the Curious Art Trail at West Norwood Cemetery, in both 2012 and 2013, funded by the Mayor of London Outer London Borough Fund, and The Curious Exchange; an audience participatory art event funded by Southwark Borough Council, for the Dulwich Festival, 2013.