Jane’s work is deeply connected to experience. Past and present have a way of meeting on the canvas, sometimes before she understands the connection herself. She begins each painting without knowing how it will end. There is no sketch and no predetermined image. A colour might stay with her, something she has read or heard in conversation might return, or it can be something as simple as the shapes made by light falling through a window. These fragments find their way into the work.

In Jane’s recent work, the boundary between abstraction and figuration has become increasingly fluid. Figures, faces and fragments of the body surface through layers of colour and mark, sometimes only revealing themselves once the work is complete. They seem less painted into the work than uncovered within it — forms that were somehow already there, waiting to be seen. This tension between the conscious and the unconscious has become an increasingly powerful presence in her paintings, where what is hidden can carry as much weight as what is visible.

A painting can take four or five weeks, and Jane doesn’t put herself under pressure to finish. The process doesn’t change; what changes is what she learns from it. Every painting teaches her something.

There is an intimacy in putting the finished work into the world. Jane has described it as revealing something of herself to a stranger. Personal experience inevitably finds its way into the paintings, but rarely in a literal sense. It is absorbed and transformed through colour, form and instinct, leaving the work open enough for the viewer to bring their own experience to it.

At the heart of Jane’s practice is a belief in the beauty of simplicity and imperfection — and the recognition that sometimes things are even more beautiful for having been broken.

When Jane first put her paintings out into the world, she never expected them to sell. They began selling quickly and painting became her full-time practice. Her work is now held in private collections in Ireland and internationally, including the United States.

Jane lives and works in Dublin