Artists

JANE WILBRAHAM

Aggrogate (1), 2011

For the last five years, Jane Wilbraham has made her sculpture almost exclusively in Sycamore, cut and carved in the green and sourced from the area around her London studio. It is a very hard, tight-grained, creamy white wood that is readily available, self-seeding prolifically on urban waste ground as well as in the field, and it was often traditionally used in vernacular British folk art including Welsh love spoons, clog soles and various utilitarian kitchen implements. For Wilbraham, it carries the dual potential of resourcefulness and poetry.

 
Wilbraham comes from rural Shropshire (on the English/Welsh borders) and through her familiarity and long standing admiration of these traditions, she has made ready use of them.

Now living and working in London, Wilbraham's sculptural practice is deliberately hermetic, extensive, repetitive and perversely time consuming, so that she can use this making time as a contemplative exercise, with motifs arising from her relationship with the urban environment, a mindfulness of things, political/economic discourse as well as from a traditional Folk art canon.
 
"I have a love of vernacular and folk art languages and the way in which they articulate an alternative, and often subversive version of history and lives; this is a history rich in personal experiences, which emphasises the value of individual knowledge over that of the universal. It seems appropriate for me to utilize this tradition now, in a respectful but contemporary manner, to develop a language that is 'time rich' and attempts to negotiate a settlement between thinking and making."
 
The sculptures are produced alongside watercolours exploring similar subject matter.
 

The use of carving and whittling is particularly interesting in the current context, says Wilbraham: " The American writers Walter Faurot and E.J Tangerman, published their useful and informative guides to whittling and carving during the Great Depression when the practice in the USA arguably reached its height, which suggests that there is a possible psychological link between extreme physical making using obdurate materials, and the experience of those living through economic disruption, trauma, dislocation or uncertainty".