About usJanet Lines is an artist who works primarily in clay.
Drawing also supports her practice.
Drawing also supports her practice.
About us
Trained at Camberwell School of Art and West Surrey School of Art and Design 1975- 1978, she completed an MA in Ceramics, at the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham in 2020
Living in Athens since 1982, she has worked in education both as ceramics tutor on the BTEC Foundation in Art and Design, Doukas and runs private workshops for adults and children while maintaining her own practice.
In collaboration with El. Sistema, Greece Janet set up the Bundles Project in 2019. Community workshops, held at Skaramagas Refugee Camp, Athens offer a place of creativity and sharing for women often accompanied by their small children. Work made through this project will raise awareness of displacement and dis-belonging.
‘Re:MAstered’ @ Crafts Study Centre, Farnham. June – September 2018
‘New Growth’ @ Heathland Artworks, Tilford. June – October 2018
Artist Statement
An investigation into the Unknown and the emotions this precarious state brings into being.
My sculpture explores the external and internal, both physically and metaphorically.
Openings, the junction between space occupied and contained, are reminiscent of mouths, entrances to narrow passageways or cavernous unknown interiors. These both invite and threaten simultaneously.
Upping Sticks: to pick up one’s possessions and move to another place.
These objects, whose beginnings at first referenced the humble stick, have become much more than the expression of movement of people, the plight of refugees. Although ideas of journeys, of stepping into the unknown are still central to my work, these forms also address our personal fears when faced with their strange, uncanny presence.
Using metaphors of familiar objects in abstract form, sticks, bundles, sacks, these pieces articulate the fragile and vulnerable state of displacement and dis-belonging. Of being confronted by the Unknown.
The viewer is asked to explore, contemplate, and question.
Working in series
process and materiality
marks of making left in evidence
making intuitively with materials
responding to that which comes into being
embracing the unexpected, allowing a flow of unconsciousness
a means to understand myself
and the world about me
My practice
This work embodies mystery, it is profoundly abstract, difficult to grasp and define, but it is rooted in clearly delineated thinking. There is a tension between the clarity of the thinking and expression against the opacity and elusiveness of the subject matter – it is knowingly about the unknown. The work is also about itself and its materiality. We can see (and feel) the making and the act of enquiry through action. The boundary edge is clearly defined but, in the bumps and undulations of the form we can see the negotiation between the interior and exterior being played out. It uses the language of the vessel and the container – hollowness and a definition of space – but eludes being labelled or limited by this in its mysterious abstraction..
– Nicholas Lees.
