JANET
WHITE
BIO
Originally trained as a graphic designer, Janet attained a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from Hull University in 2013. She held a studio residency at Crescent Arts, Scarborough, from 2015-2020, where her solo exhibition was Flow, 2017, and group exhibitions include Soundings, 2012, and the Footnotes series, 2016-2019. Performance is an element in her work and she contributed to: Helen Sear’s Wahaha Biota, 2018, Dalby Forest; the Art Party Conference, 2013, Scarborough; and Antony Gormley’s One&Other, London, 2009, and subsequent publication. In recent years her work has been concerned with issues of waste, pollution and climate change, with commissions from Scarborough Museums Trust: ScarboroArt, 2018, at The Art Gallery, and Invisible Dust: Future Fossils, 2019, at the Rotunda Museum, Scarborough. Janet is currently working on drawings relating to an archive of found pattern fragments.
ABOUT THE ART
To the Ash Tree
Janet works with found objects, plotting and mapping pathways, and tracing the experience of her environment. To the Ash Tree is her response to the ongoing, widespread loss of Ash trees from the landscape due to ash dieback, caused by a fungus. Forests are being renewed for the future with other, resistant species of trees.
Making visual-poetic associations to acknowledge impermanence, she gathered fallen leaves from beneath a single Ash tree in Dalby Forest and directly recorded them by the cyanotype process onto translucent fabric. Ghostly image qualities in the developed prints denote the absence of those actual leaves.
This ephemeral installation of small visual tokens is suspended to flutter and become tattered by the wind and rain, fade in sunlight, and gradually disappear.
With this work, Janet wishes to prompt thoughts, evoke memories and carry well-wishes to the Ash tree.