Alpha and Omega
The mineral specimen fell to the floor. What had been a consolidated mass of chrysocolla shattered into several smaller pieces, each an acceptable specimen in its own right. The process of transformation from natural material into pigment had inadvertently begun with a particular earthy odour that accompanies crushed minerals. The individual pieces were gathered up. The specimens and the debris were divided between the protagonists.
Where inspiration begins is often unrecognised. An event may go unnoticed as having any significance. Such was the case with this episode, the serendipity of which was lost to either party at the time. Later connections developed, woven together through a desire to create some kind of ordered structure out of the impressions in the mind. Pigment on one hand, mineral on the other and in their fusion a more reflective yet unresolved memory of a particular place in a special landscape.
One is drawn to a physical territory for all kinds of reasons. The Caldbeck Fells of the Cumbrian Lake District exudes a tangible sense of its chemistry embedded in extraordinary mountain scenery. In a landscape ravaged by extensive mines, a connection between the visible and hidden is palpable. The substance of colour is embedded in the minerals extracted from the deep workings of Roughten Ghyll, its memory lingering still in the fells and crags that form the amphitheatre of the Caldeck Mountain.
The residue of the broken specimen and this one time industrial landscape found their connection and opened up for Jane Foale an investigation into the evocative nature of place and the significance of material as a creative substance. The artworks that have developed echo their origins in the hills and mines of Cumbria and a fascination for the matter that forms their physical structure. They act as an equivalent means of encoding both thought and the sensual encounter with materials. Both reside in separate continuums, but they are intimately and uniquely connected.
David Walker Barker,
Department of Contemporary Art Practice,
University of Leeds
