Jane Hambleton’s Mixed Media Drawings Are Exquisite
Jane Hambleton‘s mixed media drawing series, ‘Swimming Fields’, is exquisite. Using graphite and oil Hambleton renders divers, swimmers and floaters frozen in liminal space. Figures hang in the air, in-between, the negative space as important to the composition as the positive.
Everything is ambiguous, exists at once – freedom, flying, danger, trust, fear, courage and uncertainty – and thus becomes open to interpretation.
Hambleton is a wonderful draftsman, her work drawn on large sheets of paper hung freely from the wall. The wonderful ephemeral quality she gets in her drawings is achieved by layering and texturing the paper with oil and rubbing pigment into it giving the work a real strength.
Here’s what Hambleton has to say about her work and process:
I think the marriage of medium and message comes through most in the finish of my pieces and the way I hang them. I generally work on large pieces of paper cut from rolls with some of my biggest pieces being 8 feet tall. I generally don’t frame the large pieces, but instead present them hung from cleats so the paper floats above the surface of the wall giving it a light and ethereal quality. I love this approach because not only does it mimic the subject matter, but it makes you aware of the beauty of the paper and it’s materiality. The surface of the drawing is as important to me as the drawing underneath. It’s also a way for me to combine more literal figurative imagery with more painterly abstract ideas which are both artistic approaches i’m interested in.
I love the word “liminal” or the idea of “liminality”, and yes, I think it is at the root of what my work is about. Capturing that moment between—the threshold. I’ve played with that basic idea most of my work. It’s not an idea I set out to explore, but has emerged on it’s own—something I find fascinating about making art.
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