Jayne Simpson

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Hi, I'm Jayne Simpson. I'm an artist who works in Lancaster.

I would say, I've been a lecturer for a long time and my practice runs alongside that and that's always been really important that I practise at the same time as teaching.

I'm a visual artist. my work is about people, I guess, history, personal histories. The figure is in there now - well, I think the figure has always been in there, whether that's been obvious or a very kind of metaphorical suggestion. I've worked in clay in the past, but now I am painting and in the middle bit I kind of worked with installation. So there was lighting, found materials, so I worked a lot with paper recycled packaging, um, which I'm still doing a bit now with paint. I don't think you need to have all the best materials to make work.

I was working a lot with very dark kind of paintings. There were senses of figures in there definitely about clothing and about archiving, putting things away, metaphors for feminism and my role as a mother, as well as where that sat with me as a female artist, trying to work and keep practicing.

I've got my sketchbooks all the time. I've got colored pencils, I'm drawing the figure, and also when I'm teaching, I'm drawing the figure for myself. And I'm learning to layer, I'm learning how to use different mediums, dry and wet to layer up and both cover and not hide, but archive in a way. So I always think the paintings are about conversations, pushing and pulling of hiding and revealing, and it's when you are happy with that in a visual sense. And the way that you do that, I think is going away from the studio and coming back with fresh eyes, working on them till you know, that they're balanced enough, that you're happy and you can let it sit and be, and that is that conversation done.

Lockdown definitely gave me the freedom to explore something that I promised myself I'd do for a really long time, which was embrace colour using colour as a metaphor and using colour as my visual language. And I'm still exploring that.

I started to paint gardens, I guess, kind of gateways, escapism, those spaces that I longed for. I was in a house where I didn't have much of a garden and I really longed for a garden, and I think also houses or places where you inhabit become really important to artists, those spaces are like studios really.

So we're in a studio above the market, Fleetwood market, which is very old, on Adelaide Street. Wyre Council have renovated the whole space, beautifully. Kept the integrity of the building but made it contemporary at the same time, so we're very lucky to have this. Amazing little views out my window.

I think that the walk around the area is very meditative, contemplative of other people's histories, my history, that I'm still in this area and really grateful for the sea and the environment and being at the edge of the land. And I know that's very much, uh, kind of just moving on from Blackpool because I felt very much about that in Blackpool also.

It's really, it's a calm town, I feel, and the people are lovely, they're really warm and welcoming. And I had a beautiful little commission at the museum in Fleetwood. The biggest thing about it was meeting the people, because what happened to the commission, it was about the volunteers in the end, and we worked out that there was something like eight yard volunteers.

I made a light piece based on all of those volunteers and the work that they gave freely to keep the museum going in Fleetwood. I've always loved Fleetwood and I've always loved the buildings and the history, but that little commission at Fleetwood museum really concreted that for me.