ABOUT JANE
Jane’s art practice is multidisciplinary and incorporates photography, textiles, sculpture and immersive installation. She has an ongoing interest in place and how we perceive it, personally, socially, and in terms of its historic and cultural context. Her works are generally made in response to local and global environmental and political situations. She often uses an historic object or archival material as a starting point for her artworks, tapping into collective memory. Materials she uses range from steel, fabric, paper, film and sound to ephemeral materials like mist and ice. She has exhibited nationally and in Italy, and has a Masters of Art (coursework) from the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design (Collage of Fine Arts) and a Masters of Art (studio practice) from the National Art School (NAS).
Since graduating from NAS in 2018, she has been accepted into numerous exhibitions nationally, including a selection of Masters work at Emanate, New England Regional Museum, and subsequently the Glover Art Prize (Hobart), South Australia Museum’s Waterhouse Art Prize, the Alice (Alice Springs), plus Blacktown Art Prize, the Fisher Ghost in ’21 and ’22, the North Sydney Art Prize, the Hornsby Art Prize (HC) and the Meroogal Women’s’ Art Prize (Nowra) in ‘20 and ’22. She has also exhibited in collaboration at the Incinerator Art Space and Curated Windows, The Rocks in ’22. Her artwork is held in private collections and is in the NSW State Library and National Library of Australia collections.
www.janeburtontaylor.com.au
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REDEEMING LOVE
The Redeeming Love series of collages is an exploration of vulnerable species in Australia. The selection of background is taken from images of my immediate environments, on traditional Gadigal and Gundungurra Lands. This choice is made to suggest the threat to these various species is immediate and personal. The seemingly fictional backgrounds also hint at a museum diorama. As in a museum, each caption states the animal’s status: vulnerable, endangered or, as in the case of the Tasmania Tiger, extinct.
The actual collaged images are appropriated from early colonial depictions of first contact. The apparent affection with which 18th and 19th century artists have drawn the fauna, belies the animals fate due to colonialism: the land clearing, culling, introduction of feral animals and invasive non-native plants, all threats that continue to impact on them today.
The collages are one offs and are printed using photo release on A4 archival watercolour paper, with collaged images similarly printed on archival cotton rag.
In addition to the above series, three larger works are included in Redeeming Love. These digital prints are photographs of a physical collage made up of white-washed lantana framing colonial images of native fauna. (Lantana is an invasive introduced species.) These prints are based on wallpapers retrieved from Parliament House and other historic Australian buildings. Early colonists often installed wallpaper decorated with wildflowers from their homeland. These re-imagined wallpapers incorporate the Indigenous within the colonial.
All the artworks of Redeeming Love, seek to celebrate the diversity and precarious survival of Australian flora and fauna; to call for their protection, and to redeem the initial affection that seems engendered in the early settler depictions of them on first contact.