(b 1963Canada. Lives and works in London)
Janet Currier’s work hovers on the edge between the abstract and representational. She explores an internal world where memories and emotions bubble up to the surface. Her sculptures, installations and paintings are about processing everyday experiences like the joy and messiness of motherhood, the anxiety of sickness and the stress trying to hold it all together in an increasingly precarious world.
Pattern and repetition are a central to her work. Domestic patterns, found in the remnants of an old pair of pyjamas or a scrap of wallpaper, speak of the intimate and loving work of looking after others. Repeated marks are a metaphor for the labour of caring that seems to be on a never ending but constantly overlooked loop. It’s labour that is monotonous but somehow miraculous in its skill.
Recent works often include imagined patterns that reference bodily processes at a microscopic level where cells mutate, viruses multiply and diseases threaten to engulf. The female body is somehow never far away. We are reminded of the fragility of our existence, and our interdependence with a multiverse of organisms that we can’t see or control.
