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Art show tells new toy story
by Angela Kelly22/12/2006
AN art exhibition featuring boxes of toys may sound an
especially timely attraction around Christmas.
But artist Jane Fairhurst's latest offering at Manchester's
Cornerhouse Café is much less mainstream in its conception.
Her Colour Box Series exhibition involves 14 boxes of discarded
toys from charity shops, produced almost exclusively in China and
the Pacific Rim as merchandising for films.
Fairhurst sees these easily discarded items as metaphors for
consumerist society and its twin, globalisation.
And the toys are arranged in such a way as to create an
ever-expanding colour palette in which the over-riding
consideration is the aesthetic.
The references in Fairhurst's work may be humorous, political or
personal but, as in the Colour Box Series, the context is often
deliberately ambiguous.
Fairhurst herself says she is a mixed media artist. "I work with a
variety of mass-produced and `found' objects including fabrics and
toys," she says.
Jane originally studied Fine Art Painting for her Diploma in Art
and Design at Liverpool College of Art in the early 1970s.
After time out to look after her children, she began exhibiting
again in 1987.
She was visual arts tutor with Wigan Adult Education Service and
became a self-employed professional artist in 1997, working
part-time as a community artist around the North West region.
Studio-based since 1999, she has exhibited her work to acclaim
nationally and internationally and her local fans have been able to
witness her original style in venues including Leigh's Turnpike
Gallery and at Wigan and Blackburn's own art galleries.
This year, she has exhibited in Tatton Park in Cheshire, Ormskirk,
Sheffield, Liverpool and Wiltshire among a variety of places around
the country.
As her exhibition at Cornerhouse ends on January 28 , she will be
starting a solo exhibition of her "Freefall" series of work at
Blackburn Art Gallery.
These equally unusual acrylic paintings are based on woodcuts by
Hokusai - the famous Japanese artist whose Beneath The Great Wave
Off Kanagawa is internationally- recognised.
Fairhurst has added a hybrid figure to replace the birds of the
original prints, making them very much her own.
She is based at the OK Studios in Standish, Wigan - an artist-run
charitable organisation set up to help secure a working environment
for professional contemporary visual artists.
Find out more about her work on www.janefairhurst.co.uk or about
the current exhibition from Cornerhouse on 0161 228 7621.
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