Janet Waring Rago
Janet Waring Rago
Mind Mirror (Step Back and Breathe in the Atmosphere of Your Own Meaning), 2018
Oil on aluminium
125 x 123 cm
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About this Work
In this artwork, a white line made of minute dots of paint is the final element. This is, as Waring Rago describes it, “a chain of consciousness made up of individual bodies. Each body is an unrepeatable entity but en masse they become the same as one another. Each point contains its own energy, giving the line a different kind of potential to that of a continuous line.”
Whilst in conversation with neuroscientist Danko Nikolić, Waring Rago was inspired by his theory, Practopoiesis: Or How Life Fosters a Mind, which describes how the mind is formed by a continual exchange between the brain, body and environment. In parallel, she found herself musing on the fostering of a painting as an active representation and repository of thoughts. She, indeed, conceives of her works as a Pictopoiesis, a process whereby painting is envisaged as a visual form of poetry.
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