ABOUT JANE

Jane Labaton was born in the north of England, in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution and the long emotional afterlife of Brontë country — a landscape of wild moors, soot, endurance, and quiet intensity. It remains an enduring influence. She attended a prestigious Moravian Church school founded 272 years ago, an education that proved formative in unexpected ways. Subjected to sustained bullying by both pupils and teachers — shaped by the casual antisemitism of the aristocracy and the more determined prejudice of the nouveau riche — she learned early about power, exclusion, and the brittle nature of “civilisation.”At eighteen, she was sent to Paris to study literature. Instead, she was irreversibly distracted by art. Encountering Seurat’s La Cirque for the first time resulted in a complete realignment of purpose — a moment of visual detonation that continues to resonate. From then on, she never stopped creating. Her education was deliberately unorthodox, gleaned from professional and amateur artists alike wherever curiosity was permitted. She sharpened pencils, cleaned studios, and observed relentlessly, convinced that process is as revealing as outcome. Returning to the UK, she moved to London and continued this subversive education by quietly infiltrating lectures at various academic institutions, portfolio in hand. She walked from gallery to gallery, seeking — unfashionably — to be seen. She later relocated to Israel, establishing her studio in Jerusalem, where she began exhibiting her work and consolidating a practice concerned with transformation, fragility, material truth, and the uneasy space between beauty and endurance. She continues to work, question, and make — suspicious of easy narratives, allergic to pretence, and deeply committed to the physical intelligence of materials.