‘Cultured, elegant, meticulous and greatly influenced by the work of artists like Morandi and Hepworth, Jane Simpson has created her own profound, authentic style, whose expressive force lies in the life she infuses into each of the objects she creates. These are everyday objects in which the viewer recognises and intuits his or her own experience. Through relics modelled using such unconventional materials as silicone or ice, Simpson composes a discourse which speaks of memory, the past and nostalgia.’
Fernando Francés, Director of CAC Malaga, 2004
Jane Simpson began using refrigeration while still at the Royal Academy Schools, in London. She was working with foodstuffs and in order to preserve them, she explored ways to freeze specific elements but discovered that she was more interested in the refrigeration process in its own right. Since then she has frozen - and melted - chandeliers, stair rails, sewing machines, pieces of furniture and a wide variety of objects arranged across shelves, plinths and tabletops. In each instance the process is meticulously tailored to suit the individual piece. In ‘Ice Table’ (1996) an assortment of everyday things - knives, forks, glasses, a bunch of keys and an aluminium takeaway carton - become coated in a blanket of ice which builds up across the metal topped table to create both an exquisite study in silver and white as well as a meal held in frozen limbo, reminiscent of the dust- clogged, petrified wedding breakfast of Dickens’ jilted Miss Haversham.
Her embracing of the multifarious qualities of ice stems from her profound engagement with materials. She has always immersed herself in the practicalities of process and the physical nature of whatever that she is using, even when, as an art student in the late 80’s, this placed her, somewhat out of kilter with the prevailing preoccupation with a more hands-off, conceptual approach to art production. She frequently casts in silicone rubber, where the attributes of rubber are thoroughly investigated to rich and often subversive effect. The behaviour and appearance of this highly evocative material directly informs such pieces as Butter Dish, Buttery Knife, 2002, in which the material is used to almost mimic the substance the dish would contain. ‘Hat and Coat Stands’ (1999) casts a row of six hooks originally intended for firemen, in white rubber so flaccid that the hooks cannot support themselves and are forced to dangle ineffectually in abjectly-drooping detumescence; while ‘When Two or More are Gathered’ (1998) crowds a mass of rubber sauceboats on top of a plinth where they jostle and sometimes wobble with a tension that is almost palpable. In fact, the anthropormorphism of Simpson’s sculptures causes them to strike up complex conversations not only with their audience but also with each other. Her objects and vessels droop, group, pose and cluster with an almost exaggerated gregariousness. Generators gently hum, handles shrug, spouts pout and apertures gape. These pots, vases, jugs and cups strike conversational poses and assume animated attitudes like the participants in a tableau vivant they may be motionless but they can never be completely inert.
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