Jane Perkins

Jane Perkins

Education

2003-6 BA (Hons) (First)

Interior Textiles/Surface Design

Somerset College of Arts and Technology

2001-3 Textiles 1 (Distance Learning)

Open College of the Arts

1988 City and Guilds Certificate 730 (Teaching Adults)

1979 SRN (Charing Cross Hospital)

Awards

2005 Winner Student Medal for Textiles

(National competition for 2nd year students)

Chartered Society of Designers

2005 Runner-up, Art for Life in-house competition,

Musgrove Park Hospital

2006 Ian Logan Award for Innovation

2009 People's Choice Award, Thelma Hulbert Open, Honiton Devon

2009 People's Choice Award, Focus on Great Britain, Art Works Galleries, Newcastle

2010 People's Choice Award, Renewal and Regeneration, Thelma Hulbert Open, Honiton, Devon

2012 First Prize, Equality and Endeavour, Thelma Hulbert Open, Honiton

About Plastic Classics

In my current body of work, Plastic Classics, Old Masters are given a contemporary twist. I use anything of the right size, shape or colour: toys, shells, buttons, beads, jewellery, curtain hooks, springs etc. No colour is added - everything is used exactly 'as found'.

Impressionist paintings are the perfect inspiration for my work. It needs to be viewed in two ways (as in Impressionism) - from a distance to make sense of the whole image, and close up to identify the materials used (the brush strokes). Similarly, the 3D nature of Van Gogh's thickly applied paint which he squirted straight from the tube, lends itself to interpretation using found materials. Van Gogh painted 17 different versions of his Sunflowers in varying compositions and with different coloured backgrounds. I have made several versions of Sunflowers and Mona Lisa - each one is unique, according to the materials found at the time.

Re-interpreting work by previous artists is nothing new. Centuries ago, artists learned their craft by re-working paintings by their predecessors. Picasso famously copied works by many artists, creating 44 studies of Velasquez' Las Meninas alone, with his unique style. Da Vinci's iconic Mona Lisa has been re-worked many times by artists including Marcel Duchamp who gave her a beard.