The North Atlantic Lighthouse, Hanstholm, Denmark
June 14 – August 10, 2025
There is a moment when something crumbles, when what was once pliable—soft, yielding—hardens into something else entirely. A ruin is never just a ruin; it is a record of movement, of shifting ground, of the slow work of erosion. This is the terrain Jane Hughes navigates.
This summer, The North Atlantic Lighthouse presents Everything Soft Slowly Turned to Bone, the first exhibition of Hughes’s work in Denmark. Her paintings hold the quiet evidence of change, of landscapes dissolving and reforming, of memories slipping into something less tangible. She is a collector of traces: faded photographs, fragments of rock, the skeletal remains of places that were once whole.
There are images here—ruins, tide-worn cliffs, moss creeping over stone—but they do not settle. They shift, blur, dissolve into abstraction before reforming again. Hughes is interested in what lingers. The holy wells, the forgotten forests, the islands that once held whole civilizations and now hold only the weight of their ghosts. She is drawn to fossils, to the way they surface unexpectedly, offering proof that something once existed. The arching forms that appear throughout her paintings are borrowed from fossils she found on the Aran Islands, remnants of prehistoric creatures embedded in rock. They drift from one painting to another like echoes, like the memory of an outline.
Hughes works with paint the way an archaeologist works with earth—layer by layer, uncovering something just beneath the surface. She pieces her paintings together like a puzzle where half the pieces are missing, constructing something whole from fragments. She is interested in deep time, in the vast stretch of history that came before us, in the belief systems and rituals that shaped those who walked these landscapes long before we did.
And yet, her paintings do not feel like relics. There is movement here, a pulse beneath the surface. There is color—not the washed-out tones of nostalgia but something richer, something insistent. Hughes does not recreate the past; she moves through it, dissolving borders between memory and geography, between belonging and distance.
This exhibition has been made possible by the kind support of the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Finland.
