JANE FRANCIS, born in 1971 in Aberdeen, has her practice base in Fife on the East Coast of Scotland. She is a mixed-media artist concentrating on drawing in ink and charcoal, painting with water-based mediums, collage, text, and the manipulation of paper into folded and other forms.

In her luminous and fluid mixed media artworks, Francis depicts natural forms and inner states interchangeably. When using water-based mediums she often uses unexpected surfaces, and uses expressive gestures, allowing accidents, while her work retains a delicacy, precision and sensitivity to colour and line.

Her interests are in process informed philosophy, interrelation, and marginalised forms of being, including neurodivergent and indigenous ontologies, which resist the colonial/White/Neurotypical linear and mechanical worldview.

She has worked as lead artist on several participatory art projects with groups of adults and children. They are place-based projects, exploring the environmental encounters of everyday life and how they inform the sense of self. She creates a ‘good room’, supporting community artists to explore concepts of belonging, and powerful somatic memories of childhood and relationships with the built and natural environments.

follow her at janefrancispainting on instagram

“A neurodivergent art career often looks different, and that’s ok.” Neuk Manifesto

EDUCATION

1st year foundation course Edinburgh College of Art 1989/90

MA English Literature (Hans) Edinburgh University 1995

PgDip Library and Information Studies, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, 2001

DIY ART COLLEGE – various workshops and classes.

• Andrew Paterson, Abstract Painting and Spirituality – 2014 and 2019 – Leith School of Art, Edinburgh
• Susie Wilson, Making Artist’s Books, 2015 – Leith School of Art, Edinburgh
• Claire Heminsley, ‘On your marks….get set….GO! 2016 – Off The Rails Arthouse, Ladybank, Fife
• Kenneth Le Riche, Painting the Figure in Oils, 2018 – Leith School of Art, Edinburgh
• Janet Melrose, Palimpsest, 2020 – weekend workshop at her studio in Crieff
• Brigid Collins: Making Artist’s Books 2016 – Inver Art Studios Inverkeithing; Making Artist’s Books 2018 – Leith School of Art Edinburgh; Practice Development 2019 – Brigid’s studio in Edinburgh; Poems and Plants, online during Covid lockdowns – 2020-2021
• Fraser Taylor: Summer School 2017 – Off the Rails Arthouse, Ladybank, Fife; Drawing as Impulse 2019 – Off the Rails Arthouse; Ladybank, Fife; Crit Sessions 2022 & 2024 – Off the Rails Arthouse, Ladybank, Fife
• Marissa Stoffer, Botanic Ink Making, 2021 – Leith School of Art, Edinburgh
• Rebecca Sharp: Writing Workshop 2024 – Off the Rails Arthouse, Ladybank, Fife (funded by VACMA grant)
• Kate Fox: Writing Workshop 2025 – Neurodiversity and Biodiversity, 2025, online

MENTORING

Becky Beasley, 2023 (funded by Create:Inclusion, Creative Scotland)

Brigid Collins, 2024 (funded by VACMA grant)

LEAD ARTIST ROLE

In 2013, after leading an art club at my local primary school for a couple of years, I co-created and was a co-director of a community arts CIC called Inverkeithing Arts Initiative. We organised art fairs, led creative workshops and ran a shop stocking the work of local artists and craftspeople. I was in charge of artist liaison for the art fairs, designing and maintaining the website and social media presence. One of my favourite roles during the duration was being lead artist on several participatory arts projects with local residents, for which we received support from a variety of funding bodies. I had never done anything like it before, and it was a steep learning curve but I developed techniques for holding space while talking through and sometimes hands-on helping participants with their ideas. I realised that I have a skill for listening and interpreting without being overbearing and helping others to bring their ideas from abstract concepts to satisfying conclusions.

The Place Where We Live, 2015. As part of a local artist’s project for The Festival of Creative Ageing, I led a group of primary 4 children in response to a quote from an older local resident who had lived and worked in Inverkeithing all her life. The quote was about the rythmic nature of our days, what we do, going to and from work, going to our mum’s for tea with our siblings, and how our repetitive daily lives adds up to how an era feels for us. The quote was also good at conveying the particularly sing-song cadence of Fife speech. I thought about how the children of the town had a similar relationship to their surroundings, the daily routines of walking to school, what they encounter and their perceptions of their environment. I particularly thought about how children often feel a real sense of sensorial connection to their surroundings which adults are too busy to feel. The children recreated their daily walks to and from school and the shops and to friends and family by drawing what they remember seeing on the way in brightly coloured pens, on pop up cards. These small bright drawings were attached upright on a drawn map of the town, creating a 3D riot of colour and images, their memories and imaginations made real and shared. It was delightful to see through the eyes of local children and what they had observed, the buildings, streets, walls to walk along, grassy bits to run in, dogs and cats, and in one instance, a dragon!

Fraser Avenue Treasure Hunt, 2016. Children in P5 take out school cameras to Fraser Avenue which is midway through being demolished, soon to be re-built as new housing. They have a treasure hunt to follow: eg ‘something yellow’, ‘something old’, ‘something ugly’, ‘something alive’ and so on – and they can also pick up discarded finds with which to create tableaux to photograph back in the classroom. The pupils’ photographs were quite brilliant, and we printed several up to share later in class. Later we printed out photographs, cut them in strips and wove them together, creating backgrounds for drawings of the imagined new houses on acetate. Put together, we drew a street on long strips of paper and put the houses at either side, showing what we thought the new street would look like while honouring memories of the old one.

The Inverkeithing Memory Group, 2016/2017. A group of adults of all ages who had lived in the once exciting new-fangled council houses on Fraser Avenue at some point of their lives, either temporarily or permanently. The old buildings were being demolished and new housing associations ones were being built to replace them. Some of the participants were going to move back in to a new home, and some were moving away from the area. The group reminisced about things that had happened on the street. recorded memories of their own lives, and brought in objects to share. Using photography. assemblage, crafting and writing, each person’s work was represented in a large cloth book, which is kept in the permanent collection at Inverkeithing Library and Museum.

Inverkeithing Heritage Regeneration, 2020/2021 – During 2020, a group of adults and young people of various ages responded to archeological and historical finds about the area as we welcomed regeneration funds to improve the town’s historical landscape. Through sustained self-led projects, each of the participants created work in response, which was exhibited together at Maker in early 2021. Leading the group was challenging due to Covid 19 restrictions, but we met in parks, on walks, online, and one to one at Maker. The individual’s projects were excellent responses to the brief. There were detailed drawings and paintings of historic buildings through time, considerations of how old buildings were built and the techniques involved, the history of the bay and plague ships moored offshore, and a park installation about the Scottish Witch Hunts. Everyone considered the brief through their own perspective and knowledge about their town. One of the participants drew their own version of a Janus head, inspired by their memory from childhood of a carved Janus Head sitting atop the Town Hall, looking both inland and out to the North Sea. A modified version of the drawing became a central motif for the whole regeneration project.  A new Janus head has been carved and perches on the roof of the beautifully renovated Town Hall community space once again.

EXHIBITIONS

Solo Exhibition – Eye of the Storm, 2019, paintings installed at Woodlea Farm, nr Dunfermline, Fife. A body of work about the trauma I experienced in a serious accident during a tourist boat collision off the coast of Anstruther in 2016, and the uncanny, strange and spiritually charged nature of these experiences and their aftermath. This accident resulted in many months of rehabilitation and has left me permanently visually impaired, with motifs of eyes appearing often, sometimes unconsciously, in these works.

Solo Exhibition – Across Their Many Islands, 2023, Glisk Studio and Gallery, Burntisland, Fife. A body of work created during a research and development period funded by Create:Inclusion, based on theoretical and poetic written works by autistic authors, with key theories such as the double empathy problem and monotropism, a series of mixed media works and watercolour and ink paintings. As part of this period I experimented with making inks made with plants foraged from marginal urban land.

Group Exhibition – Neuk Perspectives, Patriothall, Stockbridge, Edinburgh – 4th – 28th July 2024

Group Exhibition – Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Summerhall, Edinburgh – 9th – 27th October 2024

FUNDING AWARDS

Create:Inclusion funding awarded by Creative Scotland 2022 – 2023 – research and development period – creation of a body of work, practice development, one to one mentoring with Becky Beasley. Culminated in an exhibition of works and findings at Glisk Gallery in Burntisland entitled ‘across their many islands’.

VACMA award from Creative Scotland and Fife Contemporary, 2024 – one-to-one mentoring with Brigid Collins, participating in a 3 part writing workshop with Rebecca Sharp

OTHER ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Gallery – Creation of Glisk Studio and Gallery Space.

In 2019 I took on a pair of shops on Burntisland High Street. The building was in need of some real basic care but I enjoyed the challenge. Previous to me the tenant had run a shop based on spirituality, with items such as incense and buddhas. I felt like by taking it on to create for myself a studio based around my visual impairment needs and a gallery space I was creating my own spiritual place. I loved designing and creating the space which many have found to be peaceful and contemplative. It was finally ready just before first Covid lockdown in 2020, and it was an oasis for me to escape to and work in private, and then once non-essential businesses could open again in autumn 2020 I was able to run it as a small business, to supplement my art practice. For nearly two years it showcased the work of a curated selection of artists and makers, then in spring 2022 I changed it’s function to an exhibition space for hire by proposal and it hosted 20 exhibitions, pop-ups, open studios and workshops, before I decided to move on in 2025.

Curation – an exhibition at Glisk entitled Subtext, 2022 featuring a selection of work by a variety of artists working with text and/or book forms.

COLLABORATIONS

THE WITCH KNOWE PROJECT, 2020-2021

Growing out of the Inverkeithing Heritage Regeneration, 2020/2021 a group of artists from Inverkeithing, Aberdour, Dalgety Bay and Burntisland developed work in response to discovering that Inverkeithing had an unusually high number of accused witches, who were tried and murdered. There is a park in Inverkeithing called Witch Knowe Park which was possible close to where the accused would have met their deaths. Each artist was free to be influenced in any way they chose by the historical evidence of this period of European history. We held a crit session at Maker in Inverkeithing, the hub of Inverkeithing Arts Initiative (2014-2022) where we shared work with each other following crit protocols inspired by Liz Lehrmann.