Janet Waring Rago
Janet Waring Rago
Cultivating a Commons, 2018
Oil on aluminium
125 x 127 cm
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About this Work
Waring Rago sees the surface of a painting like a petri dish where she nurtures, cultures the paint. In her works, she makes visible the thought and process of the painting itself, bringing into the physical world the presence of something that represents invisible material relationships that give rise to and affect the visible world. Cultivating a Commons was created during a period when the artist was in creative dialogue with the award-winning American poet Nicholas Gulig. The title is informed by a poem of his, responding to her work. This period of collaboration resulted in an online publication of their work.
About Janet Waring Rago
Janet Waring Rago’s practice centres around the act of painting, embodying material with a synthesis which is the result of a long evolution encompassing poetry, nature and existential ideas of the self in a vast universe (in the face of the blank ‘canvas’). During her MA she developed a methodology that unveils the time-based narrative of a painting’s making hidden beneath the final layer, evidencing the ebb and flow that erodes the material’s resistance against the shaping of the work. Capturing successive phases, she creates a visual poetic document of the interior mind of a painting unveiling the rhythm and fluctuations of a continually adaptive transformation.
Education
2019 MA Visual Arts Fine Art Digital - Distinction
1983-1991 Painting, private studies in Florence, Italy
1981 PGCE Education (Science), University of Leicester
1980 Botany BSc (Hons), University of Manchester
Awards & Prizes
2019
Alumni Prize, Camberwell UAL
Graduate Art Prize Show (shortlisted) Herbert Smith Freehills, London
Exhibitions
2019
MA Summer Show, Camberwell, University of the Arts London
Select Show (juried) Camberwell Space Gallery, UAL
2018
Hybrids; Two Girls Gallery
University of the Arts London, Students Union
2017
Artist Talk; AS PAINTING IS TO POETRY, Usher Gallery, Lincoln
Painting; CONTINENT OF UNFOLDING HORIZONS featured for THE NEW WEATHERS; Summer Writing Programme at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Colorado USA
2016
Solo Show - REGENERATIVE, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery
Poetry and Visual Art Collaboration with Thai-American poet Nicholas Gulig, published online at LIKESTARLINGS