Jane Speedy Somerset, United Kingdom

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I am a painter, educator and scholar. I live and work in Bristol (SW England) and St Davids (SW Wales). I am not a ‘landscape painter’, but my abstract work is informed by both these environments. I am 66, and have one son. I live with my partner and work from home. My studio practice involves close attention to working as locally and sustainably as possible.

I write and make art in international artist/scholar collectives of humans and others (see: Speedy and Wyatt, 2014a and 2014b, Speedy, 2015; and Kirkpatrick, Porter, Speedy and Wyatt, 2021) and also have a studio practice as a painter.

My paintings explore more-than-human interrelationships and entanglements. I am interested in moments of shared agency between artists; materials and different modalities: such as juxtapositions and transmutations of colour and light in photographed and painted images and the moments that light and colour segue into each other. I am fascinated by the moments when photographs become paintings, or vice-versa. I am is intrigued by the relationship between stories, memories, places, things, processes and materials (and when they also become each other).

These segues fascinate me, the segues between tree and funghi in micorrhizal networks; the segues between photograph and painting: the segue between human and more-than or other-than human. How are these segues constructed? And what is the difference between ‘more than’ and ‘other than’ ? I make my inquiries with texture, colour, mark-making and writing and choose sustainable, preferably locally resourced materials to work with.

I paint on canvas and linens, on cradled boards and handmade papers and often on/with/from photographs or digital images. I work with a wide range of materials including eco-resins, pigments , enamels, graphites, pastels, wax and paint. My painting involves layering, scraping, erasing and scouring as much as it does applying materials to surfaces. I have a lot of fun making my work: serious play!