Jane Grocott (b. 2000 Durham, North Carolina) grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and graduated with a BFA from
Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2023. She now lives and works in Vancouver on the unceded
territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
Guided by the materiality of oil paint, Grocott approaches painting as a means to decode the constant influx of visual information absorbed in her daily life. Chance compositions captured with her cell phone camera or appropriated from social media are translated into abstract collages as she determines how to represent or misrepresent an image. Through responding to what is on the canvas and justifying each mark with the next, a logic is formed. Shapes are suggested through layers of paint or interruptions in patterns but are ultimately obscured into forms that are at once familiar and at the same time, unrecognizable. Toying with legibility, she is exploring the language of painting through presence and absence of form, positive and negative space, and the conversation of gestures which activate a painting’s surface.
Working in an era that is dominated by social media and the immediacy of images and information sharing, Grocott is constantly resisting and indulging ways of painting which leverage the fact of screen-based life. Confronted with the dilemma of a chaos of endless possibilities for how images are made, she see’s the making of a painting as at once a contribution to the flood, but at the same time, an act of resilience and resistance.
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Guided by the materiality of oil paint, Grocott approaches painting as a means to decode the constant influx of visual information absorbed in her daily life. Chance compositions captured with her cell phone camera or appropriated from social media are translated into abstract collages as she determines how to represent or misrepresent an image. Through responding to what is on the canvas and justifying each mark with the next, a logic is formed. Shapes are suggested through layers of paint or interruptions in patterns but are ultimately obscured into forms that are at once familiar and at the same time, unrecognizable. Toying with legibility, she is exploring the language of painting through presence and absence of form, positive and negative space, and the conversation of gestures which activate a painting’s surface.
Working in an era that is dominated by social media and the immediacy of images and information sharing, Grocott is constantly resisting and indulging ways of painting which leverage the fact of screen-based life. Confronted with the dilemma of a chaos of endless possibilities for how images are made, she see’s the making of a painting as at once a contribution to the flood, but at the same time, an act of resilience and resistance.
