Art in Stamford: Jane Hindmarch
This month, we’ve a preview of local artist Jane Hindmarch’s new exhibition of canvases and sculpture at Stamford Arts Centre. In Arcadia Ego is a painterly study of Arcadia Gardens in Sheffield, and it’s guaranteed to bring you a sense of colour and joy
“The perfect inspiration!” Stamford artist Jane Hindmarch was looking for somewhere stunning upon which to base a new project. Jane’s art practice has evolved over the years through figurative and abstract genres and most recently is focused on abstract landscapes.
In 2021 Jane was seeking somewhere that could creatively inspire an ambitious project that would eventually yield her exhibition this month at Stamford Arts Centre.
In Arcadia Ego is a phrase first used by the Roman poet Virgil but popularised by its reference by Nicholas Poussin. Arcadia became a byword for paradise, especially in relation to a garden, hence Jane certainly considered herself to have found paradise when she discovered Arcadia Gardens.
An acre of woodland and wildflower gardens, Arcadia is owned by Doug Baker and Charlotte Lui, both of whom are landscape designers.
The site originally served as a paddock for grazing horses and was to be a space where the landscape experts would develop their dream garden for their business, which specialises in creating green spaces for schools and adjacent to playgrounds.
The site comprises wildflower meadows, an orchard, ‘damp meadow’ and woodland gardens, with a mix of varied habitats.
It could also provide Jane with all the inspiration she needed to produce a series of larger canvas-based and sculptural pieces inspired by the location.
“I searched for a garden within a hundred miles that had the elusive qualities I wanted; a perfect balance between nature and human intervention, minimal intervention… more naturalistic than manicured.”
There are no neat borders, no clipped separations between bed and lawn. Instead, different habitats bleed into each other, giving the whole place a quietly modern, almost painterly sweep.
The project has been slow, deliberate and seasonal. Over 2022 and 2023, Jane travelled north repeatedly timed as much by weather as by the garden’s shifting calendar.
Jane’s research drawings were completed as pastels on paper, a medium that doesn’t forgive damp, wind or rain. Early spring and deep winter were trickiest, but she persisted through most of the year, creating two or three drawings each trip, then returning later to fill what she had missed.
Those pastels became the backbone of the exhibition and the source material for Jane’s larger canvases.
Jane works in one of the quiet attic studios of Stamford Arts Centre, with a bird’s-eye view across St George’s Square. She was the first artist to take up residency in the newly renovated space back in 1990, and the long view has suited her ever since.
“I love being up high and looking down at the world,” she says. “It removes you a bit from the hustle and bustle, which helps me focus!”
She began by developing traditional skills in art; life drawing, still life, all the disciplines that teach the eye to really understand. When she left college in Edinburgh, the pull of abstraction was strong. She was fascinated by abstract artists and worked in a freer, more intuitive language of colour and form.
Teaching, which she began in the early 1990s after returning to Stamford, eventually brought observational drawing back into her practice. In classrooms and evening courses, in schools and community settings, she found herself passing on the very skills that had shaped her.
“You only really understand what you’re doing when you try and teach it,” she reflects. “So much of what you do is intuitive.” Jane still teaches, largely through her studio work and in her painting workshops.
In Arcadia Ego will present around twelve original drawings, and a corresponding series of large canvas paintings developed from them, as well as six aluminium sculptures.
The paintings are substantial, confident works, mostly around a metre by 75cm, with a couple of larger pieces reaching 150cm by 120cm. Jane builds them slowly, with a layered process that allows light to gather inside the surface.
She begins with acrylic washes, then develops the forms in oil, finishing with coloured glazes that lend a luminous quality. They offer both calm and complexity – the kind of work that continues to reveal itself after the first viewing, and looks as assured in a modern home as it does in a gallery.
If the paintings hold Arcadia’s atmosphere, the sculptures take that energy and draw it in space. Jane’s metal practice began in 2020, with this smaller aluminium series emerging in 2021 and continuing to evolve.
Each 40-50cm sculpture is formed by hand from a single 2.5-metre length of aluminium. “I think of them as drawings in space,” she explains. “Playful, simplified lines… a minimalist, sketchy drawing you can walk around.”
Colour matters here too; Jane sprays her sculptural pieces by hand, choosing shades for their symbolic connection to what she is exploring, in terms of ideas, in the garden.
The exhibition is entirely original work, though Jane is considering a small run of limited-edition prints from the drawings, at around half size.
After Stamford, she hopes the show will tour – ideally to Sheffield itself, close to the garden that started it all – and she remains open to commissions, particularly garden and landscape pieces, which have become her specialism.
Locally though, Jane is extending an invitation to step inside the process. In Arcadia Ego can be seen at Stamford Arts Centre from Tuesday 27th January to Saturday 7th February, from Monday to Saturday.
Additionally, during the exhibition, Jane will lead two workshops: a children’s session on Saturday 31st January and an adults’ session on Saturday 7th February, both from 2–4pm.
Then in summer, Jane plans a couple of plein-air workshops in her own garden, and she will later travel to the Charleston Trust in Lewes to teach in the historic gardens of Charleston House, home of the Bloomsbury Group and continue her ongoing conversation between art, place and wellbeing.
If winter is looking a little gloomy, we guarantee nothing will lift the spirits and bring a little colour into your life like Jane’s work, it’s true; you really will be in paradise.
In Arcadia Ego takes place from 27th Jan to 7th Feb at Stamford Arts Centre Gallery. See www.janehindmarchart.com, call 01780 763203 or follow @hindmarchjaneart on Instagram.