Jane South
British-American sculptor
Jane South is a British American artist and educator known for large scale installations, mixed media constructions, and fabric wall pieces.
Early life and education
Born in Manchester, UK, South received a BFA in Theatre Design from Central School of Art in 1987 and an MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 1997.
Career
South worked in experimental theater before moving to the United States in 1989. She began her academic career in 2001 with a two-year appointment at Williams College. South taught at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) from 2013 to 2017 and was appointed Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in 2017.
She is Chair of the Siena Art Institute Advisory Board, and in 2019 was elected to the National Academy of Design.
Works
South has described her work as being "influenced by the way I have seen my neighborhoods evolve (for better and worse) over the past few years. New York City in particular is de- and re-constructed so much that it exists in a constant state of undress, exposing its often dilapidated and or shoddily or cheaply constructed layers--to me it's a reminder of the illusory and temporary nature of our sense of place". For over a decade, she constructed cut-paper architectures, playing with two-and three-dimensions to create large scale installations described as "sculptural follies" that "seem to simultaneously celebrate and mourn the constructed wonders of the world".
South's 2020 solo exhibition Switch Back was described by Jillian Steinhauer in The New York Times as "what you might call soft paintings" that "evoke homemade creations like patchwork quilts and curtains as much as the post-minimalism of Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, and even Claes Oldenburg’s replicas of ordinary objects".
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This entry incorporates text from “Jane South” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.