Jane O’Sullivan’s work is concerned with locating a considered and careful space, a place of contemplation where she creates contexts for poignant reflection.
In a search for meaning, she wishes to express the fragility that holds us and all meaning together. This hovering space often bears much sadness , melancholy, loss and darkness.
To counteract this she chooses to be whimsical as a means to further investigation and as a valuable subjective and personal theme that runs through much of the construction of her varied works of art.
Life is Supported in Mysterious Ways is an attempt to reveal a space of “passionate silence” (a term coined by Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau) and which comes from Jane’s extensive research into and around notions of poetic space. She situates her art practice around addressing the margins and edges of reality, by creating fictional worlds and performative narratives.
Working mainly in the medium of drawing, it is sometimes shown alongside experimental filmed elements, re-appropriated found objects and handmade artists books and zines, and through these mediums she has formulated a meta /alter reality and language of her own making.
Her most recent works, A deeper exploration of fragility, love and loss and Holding a Space have helped to prepare the ground for a more in depth and ambitious engagement with her subject matter.
As a development to her work Jane will make a 3minute handmade animation using analogue methods which she will construct entirely in house using her valuable store of found objects (including photographs, ornaments, fabrics and papers) with collected footage of shadows, film stills and new material.
A fully detailed storyboard is being drawn out in which the film’s content is organised alongside the technical needs of the films construction.
The film will allow her to go deeper into the realms of her subject matter as an extension and refuge for the many fragile and poetic moments addressed.
A strong association between images and related objects is important so that a series of sensitive constellations (an installation) of handmade elements, drawings,and prop ephemera emerge from the filmmaking process. Her work is inspired by a wide cross section of influences from Symbolist and Outsider art, the Foucaultian idea of the heterotopia, ,the Occult tradition of the Etheric body as an exploration of eternal. Also personal artistic or visionary investigations into Phenomena(Blake, afKlint, Redon, Kubin, Dzama,Starewitch, Wulff, Anster- Fitzgerald) alongside Victorian notions of sentimentality, particularly their language of flowers, as well as pastoral folklore etiquette and traditions. Jane O'Sullivan 2014
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