Jayne Armstrong is an artist and maker in wood. She spent a number of years teaching, researching and writing within the field of Cultural Studies, most latterly at Falmouth University, and her background as an academic informs and underpins her approach to her work. Now based in Brittany, France, she works primarily in fresh, green wood in order to explore the sculptural and aesthetic possibilities of a material that moves and changes shape as it dries. Her work is intended to play with the boundary between sculpture and function and to challenge expectations of the material itself. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and France.
Jayne Armstrong’s work is experimental and exploratory, drawing from art history, design history and philosophy. She describes her work as a dialogue between material, concept, technology and technique and her process as ‘an instinctive desire to work against the grain’, against the norms and values of her field of practice.
Each individual piece begins life with a chainsaw, then a woodturning lathe where it is often turned to no more than 1 or 2 millimetres before being left to dry naturally. Once dry, Jayne carves, bleaches, stains, burns, embellishes, paints, oils and waxes. The resulting forms are fluid, undulating and often monochromatic in tone. She also creates distinctive functional vessels and platters in seasoned woods. Each piece is unique and the outcome of multiple processes. Importantly, much of her wood is sourced locally. Some will come from her own garden, which she cuts and chainsaws herself, while other sources are friends, neighbours, the local arboriculture and the communal forest. Worked in this way, each piece of wood has a story rooted in time and place.
