Jan Dagley is a multidisciplinary artist with an MA in Fine Art and an MA in Ceramics. She has exhibited widely across the UK.

For the last three years, she has been responding to smell, specifically perfume, based on the concept of synaesthesia, where one sense stimulates another sense or senses.

She became interested in synaesthesia when painting and printmaking in response to the powerful visual metaphors in poetry, prompted by a previous BA in English Language and English Literature. This led to an interest in perfume, and how that could be used as a stimulus. To further this she took an intensive course in perfumery where she was able to learn more about perfume and discuss her ideas around smell and synaesthesia. She then started a collaboration with a perfume house called Parterre producing paintings, ceramics and poetry in response to their four signature fragrances. This work resulted in a Distinction for her MA and large exhibition at Keyneston Mill, home of the perfume house.

Her ceramics are fired to stoneware and suitable for outside, so a large proportion of the exhibition was in the formal gardens at Keyneston Mill. She has exhibited at the Pergaudeo 111 exhibition at Shaftesbury Arts Centre along the same theme.

Her  paintings are a combination of acrylics and oils with raw pigment and other materials such as carborundum. She is naturally drawn to energetic and vibrant colours and spontaneous gestural mark-making and when she started working in ceramics she wanted to be able to reflect that style.