The Reappearance; Spike Island, Bristol. Video installation with hand cast decorative plasterwork on suspended ceiling. 5 minute film of clouds with the sun appearing and disappearing behind the clouds, back-projected onto cloth.
The Reappearance invites the viewer to enter the room and look up, this looking up, required by the viewer in order to see the work, is a posture of humility, to observe something above and in some way greater than ourselves. (There were a few visitors who entered the room, scanned the empty walls and left, thinking there was nothing to see!) The title is a reference to Biblical ideas of eschatology, “…the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time they will see the son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory, when these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” (Luke 21)
Marbles consists of 30 over-sized, individually made, glass marbles. The work explores the relationship between playfulness and gravitas. The magnifying effect results in the danger of the marbles burning the floor in strong direct sunlight, thus conflicting with their aesthetic beauty.
“Jane Bentley-Taylor’s show was subtle and exquisite, the centrepiece being a number of large marbles placed on the floor. Her work was well considered, poetic and loaded with significance.”
Mike Salway, Decode Magazine
Still Life, clear-casting resin on perspex.
Still Life, shown at 6 Chapel Row, Bath has been installed into the existing window of the gallery. Each sheet of perspex measured, cut and planed to exactly fit the existing panes of glass. Resin then thrown onto the perspex sheets and fitted into the window frames. The work suspends a moment in time whilst documenting its own process of making, holding in tension the relationship between the real and the represented. Rain, which is seen in movement, is here stilled and represented as permanent, much like a photograph capturing a moment in time. Drawing attention to the beauty of the everyday in its transient and melancholy nature, the view through the window is now seen through the inverted effect of each raindrop.
Given, stack of A6 postcards, white matt text on white gloss card.
Every viewer is welcome to take a card home with them and in doing so becomes a participant not merely a spectator as the pile of cards gradually diminish. Given is a work of gradual change, as a continual process of lessening is created. This act of loss serves as a reminder of our own mortality by dissolving in act what once was solid in form, mirroring Still Life which seeks to make permanent the impermanent.