Jane Simpson (1965 – )

Jane Simpson was born in 1965. She studied Fine Art in London at Chelsea School of Art from 1985 - 88 and later the Royal Academy Schools 1990 - 93. In 1994 she exhibited work in the exhibition Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away, curated by Damien Hirst at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and also Sensation at the Royal Academy, London in 1997. She lives and works in London.

Simpson creates sculptures using such diverse materials as ice, silicon rubber, precious metals and household objects, and most unusually refrigeration. She started experimenting with refrigeration in her sculptures whilst still a student at the Royal Academy Schools, whilst working with food and developing ways to preserve it in her work, and became increasingly interested in the transformative qualities of the process.

The sculptural and photographic work of Jane Simpson references the work of painter Georgio Morandi, with a similarly intense focus on essential form particularly apparent in her modernist still life pieces. A palette of whites is evident in her ‘Milk Photos’, serial works in which household objects are semi-submersed in milk, the closely focussed image cropped to suggest a continuous shallow sea of abandoned kitchen implements. Her plinth or shelf mounted arrangements of bottles and other vessels are at once hommages to Morandi and uniquely obsessive studies featuring generic still life objects, manufactured or hand made, in ceramic or rubber, monochrome or multicoloured. Simpson’s use of refrigeration elements within her object assemblages produces an additional material in the layer of frost that forms a white coating on the base of an elegant lamp and the surface of a steel dish in Belle (Golden Age of Refrigeration) (2000). The incongruity of the frost in juxtaposition with the domestic objects invites us to re-examine and revere the familiar.

Made in Britain Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection 1980-2010,China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation 2010. ISBN 978-7-5059-7014-4.