You may have wondered where I have been?

In September 2019 the Vega Baga DANA where I lived in Spain caused a catastrophic flood that was declared a national disaster. Human lives, livestock, pets, businesses, homes and gardens were lost, some literally washed away.

My Spanish studio sat in the corner of our garden and was flooded by around a metre and a half of filthy, muddy, polluted water destroying years of work, precious photographs and possessions, my portfolios, journals and sketchbooks, my degree work and certificate, letters from my deceased mother, hand-made cards and gifts from my children, and so much more.

I was absolutely devastated and heartbroken. In addition, I lost my music recording set up, my art materials and equipment, books and resources but I also lost the will to create, I lost me!

For a year or more just the smell in the studio reminded me of the flood and thinking about all that I had lost literally made my heart pound and my head spin.

For another year I would pop in and out of the studio starting bits of work, gessoing over work that was damaged in the flood but still useable (most of everything went in a skip). But feelings would start to come to the surface that I just couldn’t deal with so I would close the door and walk away.

Because of Brexit and the whole 90 days here, 90 days in the UK thing (and some major surgery) I had not been able to spend a decent amount of time in the studio to make any headway. Call it procrastination, self-preservation or maybe just plain old fear?

But on April 10th 2022 I made a breakthrough. I couldn’t smell the DANA anymore. One of the benefits of a hot country and UV is that it does tend to clean and sanitize in an environmentally friendly way! I would still go to empty boxes thinking that something would still be there but that’s OK. I just needed to keep remembering what had gone and, if I needed it, to buy it again. The important thing is that I made a piece of work.

Beneath The Veil
As I was making it, I was reminded of the incredible power of art, the healing nature of creativity, how it reveals so much about what is going on at a subconscious level and how much I needed to start making again!

The curious, curious thing about this painting is that however much gesso I worked over the Alizarin Red under-wash (even though several years dry) it kept creeping its way back up to the surface of the painting. This is such a powerful metaphor for how I had been pushing my sorrow down even though I knew how unhealthy it was and that at some point I would have to let it rise to the surface.

I was so afraid to remove the veil for fear of falling completely apart. But I didn’t. My absolute fear shifted to a little bit of acceptance and a lot of excitement and anticipation about what I could ‘make’ from a devastating and heartbreaking experience.

The loss I felt (and still feel) was absolutely huge but if I could replace it with something positive and meaningful, inspired by those feelings, then I felt confident that it would definitely sooth my sadness.

Even after hours of drying in the warm Spanish air the colour underneath still kept bleeding through and it was even staining the gesso brush. Again curiously, since moving into the studio here at The Arches, theAlizarin Red has almost completely disappeared without me doing anything to it!

I know this is all metaphor and very symbolistic but it seems however much we try to ‘brush’ over the surface, to hide what lies beneath it is not that easy! And whatever lies beneath will always rise to the surface if we don’t deal with it! It even has the ability to taint and colour who and what is around us but more importantly who and what we are!

And from then on came my ‘innerscapes’.

Not always beautiful, sometimes raw with emotion. I have tried to keep them authentic and not make them nice or acceptable, they are what they are and they have been my creative journey over the past two years.

A very good close friend said to me “You will make something out of this experience, I know you will”. And I held onto her words, and she was right.

I N N E R S C A P E S

The underlying view of the mind as a distinct space or ‘scape’ has a long history.

As dreams incorporate elements and experiences from the outer world to shape the landscape of consciousness your ‘innerscape’ can be a vehicle that might help you to reflect upon and interpret some of what is going on in your subconscious.

Over the past two years, through this body of work, I have allowed myself to intuitively explore my internal personal geography and make visual representations of my ‘innerscapes’.

The images are a reflection of my interior world and how I experience existence. They are memories, experiences, sounds and smells, feelings and emotions. They are loss, love, regret, joy and hope. They are people and places known, unknown, visited and left, both physically and emotionally and those I might yet visit in the future, imagine or dream about.

As an artist this is my buried treasure for me to excavate, examine and record.

I invite you to walk a while on my journey with me.

Thank you for your interest and please feel free to stop at any ‘location’ that resonates with you.

 Jayne Gaze

The Artery Gallery presents a solo exhibition for one of The Artery Studios resident artists, Jayne Gaze BA.

INNERSCAPES features a collection of abstract and mixed media work created over the past two years.

Now living between Worcester and Wales Jayne has been a resident artist of The Artery Studios since January 2023 following a period of nine years in Spain. During the ten years prior to Spain, after gaining a first-class single honours degree at Worcester University, Jayne was Resident Artist and Arts Co-ordinator for Worcestershire NHS Mental Health Trust, also Artist in residence at Worcester Museum & Art Gallery, Worcester University and Worcester Cathedral for which she won an Arts Council England Award.

Founder of the charity Art in Minds she staged exhibitions in Worcestershire and beyond for fourteen years, to celebrate World Mental Health Day, showcasing the artwork of over 250 mental health service users.

During that period she continued to develop her practice with annual exhibitions of her own work and continues to sell internationally.

“Through my art I often explore and evoke emotion by utilising the lexicon of cloth, in particular gauze bandage and threads, suggesting binding, protection, injury and healing”

“Painting is fiction – sculpture is fact!”

I am trying to mimic this artist’s plight by foregoing the usual contextualizing resources (theory books, internet articles) and using only what is already in mind. For here is a body of work (and work-of-a-body) made from scratch – the scant residue of a flood that destroyed her equipment and much of her output. Three years’ void preceded it. (And there was whiteness on the face of the deep). So, I wait in a stream of recollections about Art for something pertinent to strike.

The books sink, but voices skim the current – such as this stone of a statement from 1984. The sculpture tutors at Wimbledon were energetic, astute and nurturing – but men of their time, with this macho distinction between illusions of the world and objects sturdily in it.

As a notion (there’s a word to put any idea in its place!), “Painting is fiction – sculpture is fact” barely survives unpacking; but as an analytical tool, it scrapes a path towards Jayne’s recent works. They are neither sculptures nor paintings but ‘reliefs’ – that minor, threshold form between the two. Like painting, relief presents a picture-plane viewed from one side; but like sculpture, it has more-than-surface texture. It may be shallow, but it is not flat.

Pictorially, you might discern contours of hills or waves. They are far from literal, but not abstract either, evoking unfenced nature and far horizons. Materially, though, the works refuse to hide their actual size. Some are small enough to set the scale of representation at an extreme – a 10cm square for sea and sky. Many are unframed, denying you the option of imagining another world seen through a window in this one. Instead, the artist has drawn attention to her canvasses as objects: wrapping her materials around their edges or stretching layers of gauze beyond them. We can recognize this recurring gauze as bandages. The gauge of its weave in relation to our own skin and limbs measures precisely what is before us.

Another conversational fragment – “Don’t propose what an artwork means before saying what it does.” (Goldsmiths MA tutors, 1997). Very well – the works enact this double vision: a close-up zoom on texture and a wide-angle shot of pictorial space. For an instant I’m transported to the homespun décors of childhood Stop Animation TV, to the delight of reading a twig as a tree, a button as a wheel, flattened tins as corrugated roofs. Is this scrap of driftwood an oak, this looping thread a figure stooping against the wind? The one-to-one equivalences dissolve in sweeps of colour.  Some vivid but tarnished yellow greens, that could equally indicate regrowth or decay, reverse the tiny-to-vast movement: these resemble the contents of a petri-dish, seen under a microscope. We could be inside a body. The artist’s definition of her works as Innerscapes comes into focus.

Were we within such ‘scapes’, we would be looking around and out of them, not at them from elsewhere. The translucid layers – bandage, water-resistant tissue paper, gesso – form a membrane that lets stronger hues and shapes seep partially in, from ‘outside’.

It was this seeping through that rebooted her practice.  She retrieved a dried but spoilt picture from the wreckage and, judging it reusable, applied her usual primer – gesso – to make a blank canvas; but then the artwork did something. The ruined underpainting kept coming back, its reds rising through the white no matter how many times she reapplied the gesso. She called it ‘Beyond the Veil’.

Whatever the chemical reasons for this substance’s insurrection, the phenomenon appeared uncanny. She read it psychologically, as a return of the repressed. The trauma of the flood would not disappear. Blanking it out would only delay a crisis. Conversely, confronting such trauma directly, without protective layers, would be overwhelming, akin to drowning in it.

Her healing depends upon filters, which are not breached by the trauma but do not banish it either. Gesso is promoted to a paint in its own right: brushed on with planned patchiness.  Wet-resist tissue has a uniform translucency but, ruffled and pinched, makes ridges of opacity and definition. Gauze bandage – the touch of the artist’s hand foregrounded in delicate warping and fraying of textile grids, makes for controlled unravelling, an anti-embroidery from which forms emerge.

Working the materials with tiny hand-tools connects her body to her psyche. The surfaces balloon into spaces where she is not asphyxiated. Between the real and the imagined, neither locked in denial nor plunged into chaos, is the threshold refuge of psychotherapy. She is both patient and therapist.

“How do you know when they are finished?”

“They’re never exactly finished. I stop when I’ve revealed just as much as I can take.”

In a last sequence, ‘Emergence’, a new technique propels matters to a remarkable refinement. There is a single layer, like a film or the surface tension of water. Pigments liquify, bloom and spread upon it, as if finding their own boundaries under their own volition. These might be traces of capillary action – she has painted through her gauze instead of onto it, then peeled it away to expose the residue. It has a limpid, joyous quality, expressing another kind of relief.

“The Artist’s Angst” – long ago, my mother spoke in awe of enraged male geniuses who pitched their anguish into paintings. Jayne Gaze practices a different method; one that sets the conditions for mental health.

I have said what her art does. It is for each viewer to decide what it means. You have more to go on than Rorschach inkblots (which can signify whatever you like). We could end/restart with one more leap in scale. An individual experiences environmental disaster, a publicly half-forgotten, lesser apocalypse. Even the smallest of her resulting works leads us to ask the biggest questions, about how we will process those to come.

Essay by Lalitte Stolper

Lecturer and writer based in Paris

Arts Council Art Fellow at Worcester University 2004 to 2006