Jane Hughes’s photo-montages and installations investigate various places. She is interested in alternative uses of spaces and materials not confirming to traditional parameters, but rather allowing for experimentation, innovation, errors, deliberate chaos and the rejection of uniformity. Producing a perfect image is not her number one priority – instead she focuses on the process of repeated overlapping, integration and mutation, allowing for the continual possibility of discovery. Hughes interprets her environment through assemblage and reconstruction. Her installations combine photography, video and found materials to explore modes of representation and spatial dimensions.
In the installation piece Estranged Relations, the space consisted of rotting wallpaper, window frames, moss, dirt, old magazines, plastic tablecloth, interlaced with a digital photo print of a hallway (330 x 110 cm) and a still digital projection. The images and materials were all collected from a vacant Swedish villa slowly disintegrating amidst the forest on the outskirts of Helsinki. These details were camouflaged together with a large photograph depicting a view of a collapsed ceiling at the end of wooden floored hallway, with a further still image projection of the ground floor room of a domestic interior, revealing a stairwell and window, homogenizing the different media into a deceptive myriad of inscrutable skins.
