The course at Brighton has been amazing. It has completely given me the boost and redirection I felt I needed.
Please tell us a bit about your work and your influences
I am a process led, multi-disciplinary artist, making work with drawing and printmaking methods. My repetitive mark making is intuitive and organic, exploring breath, location, and time. I often draw with materials from the environment around me.
Walking is a large part of my aesthetic practice. I’m interested in the physicality of the walk – the departure and arrival and what goes between and the discovery of a spiritual calligraphy and connection with the land.
Breath meditation drawings are made with mindful focus. A pattern of intuitive mark making drawn while I consciously undertake breath patterns or active listening. Recent experiments with Wind Drawings are exciting and new to my methodologies – these drawings feed my printmaking.
I prefer the free flow of a piece as it progresses in monotype, the playing inspires the discovery, as I recreate the repetition and visualisation of the walk and breaths, with many levels of ink to make intensity and depth. Obliterating older pieces of work to create new pieces, questioning what might lie beneath. Adding wax, and natural and metallic pigments, these watery layered images have a translucence and luminosity unique to the method and perfect for my subject matter.
More recently I have returned to monochrome pieces – stripping back the layers leaving strong bold impressions of landscape.
How have you found your course and time at Brighton?
The course at Brighton has been amazing. It has completely given me the boost and redirection I felt I needed. The tutors are hugely supportive and encouraging and although I never did get to use the printmaking workshop at Brighton, due to covid restrictions and lockdowns, it doesn’t seem to be that urgent to me anymore. What I found, having to work at home in my own shed studio, was that it challenged me to find different ways of making the work in an unusual situation. The walking and journaling became bigger, the drawing practice blossomed more, the discovery while playing and making was very important to me and I for once, allowed myself that freedom to make what I wanted to make without restriction, and think of different ways to display and show my pieces in a contemporary art situation rather than just the commercial gallery spaces that I was so used to showing in.
It’s taught me the importance of documentation in anything that you make, the fact you can look back on that, because sometimes you forget things and you need to step back to move forward.
How did you choose your course – why did you choose to study Fine Art?
I decided to apply for an MA in Fine Art as I needed to broaden my own practice, I felt I was stuck in a rut and wanted to work in a bigger printmaking workshop with connection to other artists and just try and be more informed and articulate in what I was making.
I applied during the first lockdown, so it really was a ‘lockdown moment’ – I have a degree in Graphic Design (1982) specialising in TV graphics and worked across the animation industry in London in the mid 80’s ending with a position as a creative director in a film production company making Tv and Radio commercials for the music industry.
Since moving out of London, I had 2 children, and in the early 90’s attended an adult ed course in Printmaking at the ( then) Hastings College of Art, taught by Ian Brown of Volcanic in Brighton. And so restarted my creative practice as a printmaker. I also ran workshops in printmaking.
What are your plans after graduation?
Plans after graduation are to continue my drawing and printmaking practice as it is now – create new bodies of work, enter more open submission calls – I have just been longlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.
To organise more breath mark making workshops as after doing the MA I now feel more informed and able not only about my own practice but to be able to facilitate and help others shift their own practices if needed.
Also, to allow myself a little break, I have felt that sometimes, being on the course has been all consuming ( because I am a mature student I have family, life, domesticity to run with as well) but that is only in a positive way!
Follow Jane on Instagram @janebeechamartist and @janebeecham
Website: https://janebeecham.portfolio.site/
Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/janebeechamprintmaker
Breath Flags on YouTube. https://youtu.be/P26k1xESy6E
Wind Drawing Experiments youtube https://youtu.be/nZoKpB3V7z0
Studio based wind drawing https://youtu.be/Da95_0w3kz0
Find out more about MA Fine Art
