Jane Wheeler
Jane Wheeler was born and raised in Norfolk. Following studies in ceramics at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, she enjoyed a successful career designing textiles. She returned to ceramics in 2003.
For Jane, the vessel is a space-containing hollow form that offers the richest language for working in clay. Its conceptual simplicity allows readings which allude to our most distant cultural pasts, and to the state of being human. Its limitations are those for which the potter's tools and equipment are designed; it is a familiar scenario within which to work. Thus, it becomes necessary for Jane Wheeler to make working and the work uncomfortable in some way, to push the boundaries in order to attempt discovery of new or hidden qualities of this profoundly significant, yet ordinary object.
The apparent fragility and age of these vessels tempers their insistent sense of function, a function that we understand rests on implicit but radical contradictions. The cracks in a bottle form which deny it the possibility of containing a liquid produce a deliberate uncertainty about what constitutes a vessel. The appearance of age and wear, as if the pieces had somehow been weathered and eroded over geological and archaeological timescales, evokes a sense of history and of humanity.
Jane's vessels are made of stoneware clay bodies with added coarse grog, sand, quartz and feldspar granules. reduction fired to 1260-1300 º C with gas. Layers of oxide, slip, and chun glaze producing the textured surface which both reflects and absorbs light and refracts it where the chun gathers into thick runs full of miniscule bubbles.
Selected Exhibitions
2014 David Simon Contemporary, Bath
2011 Bircham Gallery, Norfolk
2009 Beaux Arts, Bath (solo show)
2009 Lund Gallery, Yorkshire
2008 Beaux Arts, Bath (solo Show)
2007 Le Bain HGallery, Tokyo, Japan
2007 Mediart Gallery, Paris
1993 Finalist Arthur Andersen Art Award, London
EAST international open, Nowich
Open Door, London
Museum collections
Pallant House, Chichester, E Sussex, UK
