Jane Spray, an artist and poet, came to live in the Forest of Dean in 1983, when her elder daughter was 9 months old. She and her family remember the first phase of the Sculpture Trail, back in 1986, before it was way-marked:
‘imagine sculptures in a forest
and everybody lost but still looking keenly
in the darkening light….’
Jane studied art, ceramics and sculpture at Brockwood Park, Hants, before qualifying as a landscape architect at the then Gloucestershire College of Art & Design, Cheltenham. Before moving to the Forest she spent 2 years working as an environmental artist and community landscape architect in Tower Hamlets, East London.
She then worked for a number of years, and as a director, with Community Technical Aid West, Lydney, on various landscape, environmental and arts projects in Wales and the South West, 3 of which have won Times/RIBA Community Enterprise awards.
In 1986 Jane completed a course in Workshop Ceramics at the Royal Forest of Dean College, and became a selected, exhibiting member of South Wales Potters, with whom she has worked on award winning gardens at Stuttgart and at Hampton Court, as well as making pots and sculptures for several other award winning show gardens, including one at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Since 1991 she has worked mainly as an artist, both as a ceramic and a landscape sculptor. She has worked in a variety of ways :on environmental, collaborative design, community and educational projects, and as a lead artist on public art projects, e.g. courtyards for the new Ridgeway Centre, Weymouth, Dorset. She has exhibited widely, both ceramic sculpture, and site-specific installations in Germany, Sweden and Cuba as well as the UK. Her work is often concerned with nature and growth, fertility, process, place, and change. She has also worked extensively as an artist and consultant with Artshape Gloucestershire, on collaborative art and design projects with other artists and with people with learning disabilities and mental health survivors.
Jane is a founder member of the Landscape and Arts Network, and is currently involved with the Network in working with Portland Sculpture Trust on ideas for Independent Quarry. She has also become a trustee of the recently formed Enys Trust, for the restoration of a historic Cornish woodland garden near Falmouth.
She has for a number of years been active in the arts locally, as a founder member of the Forest Artists Network, as a former director of Cinderford Artspace, as an organiser and participant in Forest Open Studios, and with several overseas exchanges. During Lightshift, on the Sculpture Trail, she assisted artist Tony Sinden with his video projection piece. Works involving light, and projections in the landscape, are a growing interest.
As part of her research for the Sculpture Trail Diversity Project with Erika Tan, Jane joined the ‘Green Team’, a practical nature conservation task force in the Dean, and issues of bio-diversity have been informing much of her work. She has also found herself, in some of her temporary works for the trail, paying tribute to aspects of some of the existing works on the trail, as part of the unique layering of cultural diversity that the presence of the Sculpture Trail has added to this part of the Forest of Dean.
Jane Spray, Hillside, Aston Bridge Road, The Pludds,
Ruardean, Forest of Dean GL17 9TZ, England
telephone +44 (0)1594 861404
email : Jane Spray