Artist Statement
Jan Crombie works with painting and ceramics to develop a timely enigmatic and figurative language mixing both real and imaginary elements. Her work, distinctive and dreamlike, combines an allegorical mingling of autobiographical, art historical and fictional elements that draw attention to social and existential issues and conflicts. Her surrealist landscapes highlight the human condition, reflecting a search for individual identity that often has to be renegotiated, in a world that is constantly shifting in the face of huge global problems, changing societal values and complex digital technologies
Characteristically, Crombie draws on influences that vary from world myths and legends and wide ranging philosophical texts to folk art and classical sculptures. There are references to the simplistic telling of fairy tales where absurdity can happen in a vacuum, and time and space can merge or disappear. Universal themes around identity, race, motherhood, migration, and global warming are rendered intimate and emotional by becoming specific, being given a face, a story and a context.
Recognizing the power of the collective unconscious, Crombie accesses imagery in her subconscious mind through liminal dreaming and automatic drawing. Embracing the act of relinquishing control, she allows the imagery to develop on the canvas in almost filmic sequences until the characters she is working with have assumed their final forms. Her painterly process involves a refined mixing and layering of colours to allow the imagery to emerge organically. Her vivid colours describe tense scenes where her mostly female protagonists are captured in the middle of rituals, everyday events, or at times catastrophic scenarios. Disrupting convention they surprise the audience with their power and agency, creating their own sovereign worlds and taking ownership of the minimally suggested landscapes they inhabit.
Influenced by the anthropomorphic sculptures of her father, British sculptor Peter King, Crombie’s ceramic sculptures depict human/ animal hybrids and reference her lived experience of displacement and fractured family life. Addressing the universal themes that continue to concern her, the monochrome sculptures hold a powerful space in her oeuvre and resonate with her paintings.
The emotionally charged chimerical creatures, hybrid humans, zoomorphic forms and imaginary spirits exist in the same place and time as images of the people Crombie encounters in everyday life. They show us new identities and new ways of inclusive living, echoing a post-humanist, fairytale world where basic concepts for living together are by necessity reinvented. A cast of characters advocate a new connectedness across time and space, helping a new kind of fellowship to emerge. The female protagonists, caught in a moment of transition, are portrayed as having a new agency arising from a collective understanding of the problems they are facing in a rapidly heating world.
Bio
Jan Crombie was born in an artists commune, spent much of her childhood in Vienna, and now lives and works in Norwich UK. She has been a lecturer in Fine Art Painting at Oxford Brookes University and is Chair of Trustees of OVADA Gallery Oxford. After studying for a BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College she completed a postgraduate degree at Oxford University.
Her work has been the subject of solo shows including; Anteros Gallery, Norwich 2023; Salthouse Gallery, Norfolk, 2022; Glass Tank Gallery, Oxford Brookes University, 2018; New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge UK, 2006; OVADA Gallery, Oxford, 2006; Said Business School Gallery, Oxford University, Oxford, UK 2004.
Selected group shows include: Studio 1.1 London 2023,; Wells Contemporary, Wells 2021; Castlegate House prize, Cockermouth 2019; Selected, New Hall Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2016; Last and First Men, Old Battersea Library, London, 2012; Threadneedle Prize Mall Gallery, 2011.
Crombie has work in the New Hall Collection of Women’s Art, University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK, as well as in private collections in the UK and abroad.