Jane Cordery

Newsletter 2: January/March 2024

Circle I - Connect

'How do you fill your days?' A friend asked me recently - "with too many tasks" was my unspoken response!

Being an artist today isn’t just about producing art but about posting on social media, updating web-sites, attending art training,  net-working on line and in person, preparing for exhibitions, keeping up to date with new technologies, meeting with framers, pricing and recording work, attending private views, visiting art exhibitions and galleries, keeping abreast with current art and researching the world in general and up-dating newsletters!  In short, it is a full-time job. So what am I actually working on in my studio at present?

The Art of Communication:

Communication has changed rapidly during the 21st Century. Everywhere I look: on trains, on platforms, in restaurants and cafes, along the streets, outside of schools, within places of work, in tourist locations, in galleries and even sometimes in cars, everyone seems to be looking at screens.  Beautiful mornings, stunning sunsets, trees in blossom, fields of green, carpets of snowdrops, people we are with (often children) all seem to go unobserved and mental ill health among the young seems to be sky-rocketing. Art is about observing and commenting on life.

Behind my artwork is an awful lot of sociological and anthropological research, thinking and, eventually, artistic expression.  There are so many artistic ways of expressing such observations, through: portraiture, video-art, text art, dialogue, performance art to name but a few.  But for me, at the moment, it comes out in a very abstract, sometimes geometric, format expressed through lines, dots, form and colour in a combination of drawing and painting as well as sculpture. 

To me, lines are connections, dots are people, circles are spheres of influence/the world, triangles are a group of three (which many sociologists suggest we naturally group in), grids are our voluntary and involuntary structures of life, colours are intensities of communication or the colour of spaces outside which we are ignoring or the ‘colour’ of our emotions as we communicate. 

A mess of lines going all over the canvas in different sizes of groupings is my way of demonstrating how complex our communication has become.  Lines almost obliterating the background landscape are my way of showing how technological communication interferes with our observation and interaction with our surroundings – we are becoming disconnected to ‘real’ life in favour of an abstracted, artificial life; so my art expression is abstract and 'artificial', almost replicating technological diagrams of communication.

In sculptural format I typically express the line through thread/yarn or wire (a sculptural line), often combined with glass to express our growing fragility through:  technological anonymity, excessive time on communication, exposure to those that seek to harm/misinform us and exclusion if we do have access to it.

One of the first pieces of work I made on this subject was 'Circle I – Connect & Disconnect'.  A glass tondo wrapped initially in black thread, then overlayed by multi coloured vibrant thread.  The proportions of the black and coloured threads related to the earth’s diameter in proportion, respectively, to the world population that were not connected to social media and those that were (primarily the West, democracies and economically advanced countries).  Viewers only tend to see the very colourful threads; to me this parallels the way we see the world, those who are not connected (the poor, the politically prohibited) become the ‘unseen’.

Social media has changed significantly since making that piece bringing with it both advantages and disadvantages.

Do I expect the viewer to understand this or even like my work? No, not really, but this is my very personal and individual response to my observation and thinking.  Shape and form have become my individual artistic language.  I hope it intrigues and maybe fascinates enough for some discussion before the viewer walks on to look at their mobile screens - and I’m content with that!