Jane Burden is an artist living and working in West Dorset. Fascinated by both ceramics and textiles, she has long sought ways to combine these mediums in her investigative work.

By combining smoke-fired, hand-built ceramics, pressed porcelain casts and colourful textile threads, Jane produces highly crafted, reflective work that connects to themes of ancient landscape, social history and human emotion.

Projects and commissions have allowed a range of ideas to be explored and the resulting studies include:

casting the past: barns, buildings & Sherborne House

On returning to Dorset in 1998, converting an old barn meant removing marks, materials and memories from an old clunch building. Determined to record these traces from the past, Jane took clay moulds and hand pressed porcelain to make delicate and evocative white casts.

Other endangered buildings, barns and museums were recorded and the resulting porcelain work- either mounted or hung, preserve visual elements of social and personal histories.

In 2008 Jane collaborated with photographer Kirsten Cooke to record the abandoned and decaying Sherborne House. The moulds she took were used to produce the new 2024 work that is on display at the newly restored, The Sherborne.

landscape bowls:

Jane has always found delight in the folds, curves and hollows of the gentle west country landscape. Using a heavily grogged clay she shaped, textured and slip-decorated clay into glorious landscape ‘bowls’ to celebrate the extraordinary landscape of West Dorset. Found clays, oxides and silica-rich material was often dug up on local walks to make them truely ‘from the land’.

tangled threads:

This deeply rooted and cathartic Tangled Threads series, explores on a number of different levels the tensions between calm and chaos, order and confusion.

Considered use of materials and techniques bring together beautifully hand-cut and burnished ‘yarn cards’, which are individually stamped, smoke-fired and wrapped in dyed threads. The careful arrangements of smoked tones and subtle coloured yarns allow for powerful communication through a unique medium.

lost words:

Inspired by a stone font in Northern France, carved by Welsh monks in the 12th Century; this project continues a conversation started by the writer Robert McFarlane which is still being globally extended into creative music, dance and art.

Drawings, photographs, moulds and casts are being taken to explore themes of migration, nature, faith and dependency. This project is ongoing….