Jan Dagley exhibition 25 July-1 August

 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.

As she is endeavouring not to default to an entirely visual orientation of the world but to encourage an immersive experience which also engages the olfactory and haptic senses, each piece is accompanied by a pebble infused with the particular smell to which she has responded. The audience is invited to smell the pebble as well as to touch the vessels, encouraging a more interactive relationship with the work.

Whilst providing a more engaging experience for any audience she could also see the particular relevance of art based on the olfactory sense for the visually impaired. Booklets of haiku she has written in response to the perfumes accompany the work, each haiku also having its Braille translation.

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.

She finally resolved on the combined use of use of slips, underglazes and stains for her vessels as the colours before firing are pretty similar to those after. They also allowed her to paint with the free gestural marks she uses in her paintings and achieve an overall synergy between the two dimensional and the three.

She also makes large platters which again provide a good surface for her abstract painting. Some of these are fully glazed which others are matt with occasional areas highlighted with a clear transparent glaze.

Each of her vessels is topped by a ‘crest’ which unites the work, giving it a ‘family’ feel, as well as further representing the shapes of the fragrance she is responding to. The flat, graphic silhouettes of the crests provide an interesting juxtaposition with the rounded forms of the vessels.

She is now broadening her response to smell from perfume specifically to more generic smells like that of grass after rain or the immediate hit of salty sea air, especially marked after a period of absence.

She held a one-man show at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London last year and has taken part in Dorset Arts Weeks.