VIVID MEMORY ‘Bitten by Witch Fever’ (detail), by Jane Hughes.
‘Architecture of Emotions’, an exhibition of paintings by Jane Hughes opened at the Custom House Studios Gallery, The Quay, Westport, last week. The show consists of a series of new paintings exploring place and belonging, while the title references both our ability to be the architect of our own emotional landscapes and the influence of architecture on our emotional psyche.
The imagery is influenced by an interest in the psychology of displacement, memory and transition spaces. Through painterly processes the artworks delve into memory, not as something that is singular but as a montage of memories as slices in time laid on top of one another. There is also an attempt to dig into transnational perspectives of place and social history.
This manifests itself in snippets of remote landscapes, fragmented interiors and mutating structures, through abstraction and suggestion, loose lines and melting boundaries, as a strategy to explore psychological states between connectedness and isolation, past structures and present remnants, this world and other possible worlds.
Jane Hughes was born in Dublin in 1984, and she currently lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She graduated with an MA in Environmental Art in Aalto University, Helsinki in 2012, and received her BA in Fine Art Painting, National College of Art & Design, Dublin, in 2006. She has exhibited in France, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, Finland and elsewhere. She has also taken part in several artist residencies in Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Germany, as well as the Heinrich Böll Residency on Achill in June 2019.
Place, belonging and emotional landscapes explored
