I PUT A SPELL ON YOU ( 2021) at Galleria Ars Libera was an exhibition encompassing a strange web of paintings that explore the dreamy realm of magic, religion and superstition. Hughes is an image hunter. The found image, the tangible photo from the outside world is an access point to dig into the intangible inner worlds, that the artist hopes will resonate again to the outer world weaving the social and the personal through the painting process.

The works depict a range of subjects from fortune tellers to magic paraphernalia to scenes of headless women or figures in cryptic scenarios.The paintings create deliberate non-linear narratives, surreal fragments jumbled together offered to the viewer to unscramble and project their own meanings, connections and stories. The exhibition was kindly supported by Taike (Arts Promotion Centre Finland).

Someone Else’s Stories(2020) was a collaborative exhibition by Jane Hughes and Taru Kallio of paintings and drawings installed in a collage approach to create a gesamtkunstwerk. The artists worked together on a shared approach working with found images exploring a range of topics from female mystics, colonial architecture, work houses, hydrotherapy and other blurry histories. Hughes working with painting and Kallio working with graphite drawings which come together through strategic hanging creating dialogue between specific works. Read a conversation between Hughes & Kallio about their work for Galleria Huuto here.  The exhibition was kindly supported by Taike (Arts Promotion Centre Finland) and Embassy of Ireland, Finland.

Jane Hughes solo exhibition, The True Believer at Laikku Culture House in Tampere, Finland (2020) featured a series of paintings depicting fragments of our social history. The exhibition title refers to The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer first published in 1951. Hughes is fascinated by his descriptions of group behaviour and insights into social psychology which are still relevant today. The painting process is a way for her to take part in a cultural dialogue with images of the past, to delve into the nuances and layers of the social psyche. The exhibition was kindly supported by VISEK, Taike (Arts Promotion Centre Finland) and Embassy of Ireland, Finland.

Place, Histories & Other Matters (2019-2020) is a series of 15 paintings exhibited at Toradh Galleries in Ashbourne and Kells invited by the Meath County Council Arts Office in Ireland from November 2019 – March 2020. The paintings explore cultural histories using found images from Irish newspaper archives, and old books collected in Germany and Finland. The paintings come together to form a collection of visual ghost stories featuring faceless figures in shadowy landscapes to form smorgasbord of social commentary.  The exhibition was kindly supported by Meath County Council, Ireland.

The exhibition consisted of a series of paintings exploring place and belonging. The title references both our ability to be the architect of our own emotional landscapes and the influence of architecture on our emotional psyche. The imagery is influenced by an interest in the psychology of displacement, memory, and transition spaces. Through painterly processes the artworks delve into memory not as something which is singular but rather a montage of memories as slices in time laid on top of one another.This manifests itself in snippets of remote landscapes, fragmented interiors and mutating structures, through abstraction and suggestion, loose lines and melting boundaries, as a strategy to explore psychological states between connectedness and isolation, past structures and present remnants, this world and other possible worlds.  The exhibition has been kindly supported by the Meath County Council, Ireland.