Artist's Statement

Janet's practice is based on the materiality of alabaster. Alabaser is gypsum, which is calcium. Critically, gypsum is laid down in sea water and contact with water continues to control its behaviour thereafter.  It rapidly dissolves back into water therefore it appears and disappears on a human time-scale rather than a geological one.

Current scientific investigation shows calcium is critical in all life forms, serving a vital role in both life and death. In humans, as well as being the architecture of the body, the activation of neural networks in the brain by calcium creates implicit functions: memory, knowledge, language, consciousness, imagination. Consequently, as calcium, alabaser becomes central to a vast network of connections linking our planet, through time, to significant cultural and geological narratives, rhythms and cycles, wth the speed of the electrical impulse of a neuron at one extreme to geological and evolutionary timescales at the other.

Alabaster itself becomes a membrane through time connecting the sculptor and the stone to the life it used to hold via the forms being created.