Jayne Simpson is a visual artist, mentor, educator and curator in the North West of England.

She has taught visual art in further and higher education and privately for the last 30 years and now teaches life drawing and mentors privately with individual artists and organisations alongside her studio practice at The Birley Studios and Project Space, Preston.

She has recently organised and hosted symposiums and exhibitions of female painters from the North of England, this work has been gratefully supported by Arts Council England and Lancashire Sports and Culture Fund.

She is an exhibiting and commissioned artist and her practice reflects on memory and personal histories. She is responding to the passing of time and the human condition, especially as the lived, female experience.

Her paintings, often bodily, entwine figurativeness with gestural, abstract layering of brushwork. The colours, and levels of opacity and transparency are metaphors in the passing of time, the brushwork reflects experiences we seek to hide or forget and those we need to unarchive and return to.

There is an established visual language in her work, drawing is a big part of each painting, the threads or skeleton which hold the rendering of colour plains together. The conversations with each work are constructed in a therapeutic way, of layering and reworking and leaving when that visual conversation can say no more. Sometimes new thoughts make her return to that conversation and at other times, the work is done and the conversation came to a satisfactory conclusion. Her work is often about aging and the significance of that but has always been about time, lived experiences and her personal archive.This is in reference to loss, bereavement, motherhood, womanhood and what that can feel like physically and emotionally.

The painted and constructed surfaces play with the idea of ‘expanded painting’ this approach seems both a natural progression of her painting process and a revisiting of established methods that consider space and the bigger experience of the work. 

Recently there are distinctive and celebratory conclusions of forgiveness, enlightenment, and resolution.

The most recent paintings, are a strong resolve, often painted on repurposed bedsheets, are informed by Bachelard and changing family heritage. Reclaiming the domestic as a site of resilience through semi abstraction and where gestures of the human form emerge with renewed strength.

Conjoined, 2022. Oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas.