Artist's Statement

Jane Brettle’s work explores the relationship between institutional spaces and the presence of the body, often in relation to gender. Over the past few years she has been making work in relation to Art Gallery and Museum Collections using large or medium format photography, more recently focussing on the portrait and the portrait gallery as a space where the ‘great and the good’ of Western post enlightenment society have been given individual recognition.

Within this process she has also asked the question “who, historically has been considered a suitable subject to be displayed in these institutions and who is missing”?

The use of colour photography and scale are an important element in her photographs in that they ‘mimic’ the painted portrait in museum collections.

The artist’s earlier works were often large-scale, lens-based installations made as direct interventions on and within the space of buildings. An on-going pre-occupation has been with the interior and exterior relationship of these spaces and cultural objects as they are represented by ‘surface’, that is, at the point at which they become image, either through video, light projection, or photographic print.

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