My work is rooted in my everyday experience and my personal history. My mother was a seamstress and a lace maker; my father restored antique clocks, working in a small shed at the bottom of the garden. The rest of my family has worked in the wool mills or steel industry, making tools. So I come from a family of makers, and that is what I do: I make things. Using domestic objects I have an intimate connection to, I work intuitively and, in many cases, repetitively. The act of making becomes a personal ritual, a process of revealing that which lies beneath the surface of the everyday. 

Born in Huddersfield, England Janice Redman received her BFA from Kingston University, Surrey, and her MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is a former Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has been the recipient of many awards, including The Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Massachusetts Cultural Council award in sculpture. Her residency programs include Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York,and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts In Houston, Texas. Janice’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, Michigan. She lives in Truro, with her family, bees, chickens and large vegetable garden.

Words from Elizabeth Bradfield, writer/naturalist:

As I write, Janice is at the table next to me, her sewing machine humming along, scissors snicking. Over the years,there have been other machines and tools that have spoken into the space between us: drills, bandsaws, sandpaper, the pull of a threaded needle through waxed cloth, scratch of pencil on paper. Maybe she’s aware of my tapping, my page turning, too.

On the walls and shelves around us, sculptures in various stages of progress wait… or Janice waits for them to speak again and guide her. Everywhere is the presence of the hand, of the body at work on and with material objects. In Janice’s sculptures, evidence of the labor of creation is a significant part of the artwork’s power.

Every time I join Janice in the studio, which I have weekly since 2013 (barring travel), I look around to see what has shifted, what piece or space is moving into active process. This is a dynamic space, a space that thrums with potential energy. 

Janice and I are neighbors, and both of us value the quiet space that making art (sculpture for her, poetry for me) demands, but we also find that time together is a way to focus our attention, to push aside the calls of dishes or email, to encourage each other by being in the presence of another person deep in their work. We anchor each other in these hours. And we free each other to play, attempt, and be.

What I’ve come to understand and admire is the patience Janice has for her work to find its own way, on its own time. She begins by doing, allows ideas and emotions to evolve and then manifest themselves as a sculpture comes into being. As much as Janice’s sculptures are about wrapping or hiding, her process is one of uncovering and discovery.