As humans we are a curious species. We are both the subject and object of this curiosity. This page  is to provide a little BACKGROUND to the artist  JANE MUNRO.

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Born in 1956 in Britain Jane Munro is a fresh and exciting new artist to the art market. She has followed a continuous path in the field of visual imagery since obtaining a BA degree in Film and Photographic Arts from the Polytechnic of Central London in 1981 where she was tutored by Victor Burgin and Simon Watney and became part of the group known as the PolySnappers with Jo Spence. Subsequently she created a photographic studio in Dalston, London which undertook commissions for publishing groups, PR companies and advertising agencies whilst continuing to create a career in portraiture. In the 1990s she set up a photographic and design studio in Birmingham. During these years a style began to emerge that germinated the seeds for later developments and the move into mixed media, montage and digital artwork. Throughout this time, she was using double exposure techniques both in her commercial work and in in the creative sphere which has formed many of the building blocks that underpin her current trajectory. Jane has received many commissions throughout her career that has taken her across the globe informing her in the current artwork that she is now producing.

The ongoing debate of representation and its cultural significance in a societal context has always been at the heart of her work. The advent of technological changes was propitious in many ways and enhanced her visual lexicon, opening-up an entirely new palette of possibilities.

More recently her work has developed and matured into a comprehensive style that is entirely unique in this field, pertinent to contemporary events and the eternal human questions of love, death and loss. 'Crossing The Divide', featuring a mother and son relationship was shown and sold at the London Art Biennale 2025.

Grounded in a love of the History of Art with strong influences from the Early Renaissance defined by the works of Masaccio and Piero De La Francesca through Expressionism and to Abstract Expressionism it is possible to trace some of the key elements that provide the foundations upon which the work has emerged. Through the digital revolution in photography, Jane arrived full circle to her original passion for drawing and montage.

 

 

 

CURRICULUM VITAE

1978 - 1981 POLYTECHNIC OF CENTRAL LONDON BA HONS FILM & PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS

THE POLYSNAPPERS WITH JO SPENCE, MARYANN KENNEDY & CHARLOTTE PEMBREY

EXHIBITION : FAMILY,FANTASY AND PHOTOGRAPHY.

1982/3  ROGUE IMAGES

1983 - 1987 JANE MUNRO PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIO,LONDON

COMMERCIAL WORK UNDERTAKEN FOR ADVERTISING AGENCIES BBH, YELLOWHAMMER,

DIRECTORY OF ART & DESIGN, DORLANDS, GOOD RELATIONS,

1987 - 1993 DIRECTOR PREECE MUNRO DESIGN & PHOTOGRAPHY, BIRMINGHAM

EXHIBITION : CYCLOPS GROUP SHOW 1991

EXHIBITION: BIRMINGHAM PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS AWARDS 1992

EXHIBITION: LONDON ART BIENNALE 2025

CLIENTS INCLUDED CANON, BIRMINGHAM ROYAL BALLET, BIRMINGHAM MINT, AT&T, JAGUAR CARS 

1994   JANE MUNRO FOTOGRAFIA RONDA MALAGA 

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EXTRACT FROM THE BOOK  JANE MUNRO MONTAGE  published 2026​

 

 

 

FROM WHERE TO WHERE

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“I don't look for skill in art - skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency... I'm interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or reimagine it… I'm looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is actually saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive."

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Jerry Saltz Art Critic.

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Art is both self-exploration, observation and expression where the outcome, although certainly uncertain, is a consequence of where these things meet. Hopefully, as artists we provoke a sensation in the audience, the viewer idling by in a gallery that stops a little longer to wonder at the creator's intent or revel in the sheer exhilaration of form and colour. Maybe their blood runs a little quicker in their veins. But we have the privilege of engaging with the rest of humanity without compromise and at a safe distance, for no one draws or paints 'back at us.' We invest in a form of communication that should contribute to greater levels of understanding or simply a glance at a momentary joy, but are we displaying traits of generosity or of selfishness? Do we choose our path out of fear or arrogance, or the opportunity to satisfy our need for displacement?

The answer is probably, all of the above and more. However, there is one commonality and that is the desire to share, that overly used concept, our narrative - whether the rest of the world wants to participate is of their concern. To 'make our mark' appears to be an indisputable human trait; as the pre-historic archaeologist Aeron Deter-Wolf wrote, we probably painted ourselves, our very own skin, even before we started to paint on the walls of caves. For its sheer beauty and complexity ancient Polynesian tattoos rival even the master tattoo artists of today. Much of the practise of tattooing was to illustrate power, status and rank but, as time has run on, we now have external, material objects that we acquire to demonstrate this power. The tattoo on a human form is much like the frescoes on the ceiling or wall of a church or chapel, in as much as it is connected to a specific site and the two cannot be divorced from one another. Easel painting changed this by creating a moveable object and thus a commodity to be exchanged or bought and sold and photography itself created yet another paradigm shift in the era of mass production. One can no longer compare an original with a reproduction in this field of image making. Both artistic practises can be seen clearly in conjunction with other political, religious, and economic developments. The Digital Age that encompasses the internet, CGI, AI etc has thrown us forward from this dichotomy and created a whole new set of questions to wrestle with including notions of 'real 'and 'fake' , the absence of time and space altogether and indeed human intent itself.

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So how do we grapple with these profound changes to develop the framework that John Berger gave us in 1972: ''Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'' The words I find most chilling are - 'seeing.........establishes our place in the world' when we come to realise that we no longer know what we see and consequently our place in the world no longer exists as it was once conceived of. This is an existential question of extreme alienation.

In 2019 James Bridle broadcast New Ways of Seeing for the BBC to address some of these questions and highlighted the extent to which the infrastructure of the Digital Era is so literally unseen that it is changing the way in which we consume imagery altogether but strangely, our immediate physical environment looks little different, creating a more fundamental dissonance to our lives. Furthermore, the technology which we have created has become a kind of never-ending tape loop that reinforces certain biases. The past six years have witnessed, at even greater speeds, the changes that have been wrought upon us but how many of us are taking the time to stop and look beyond the confines of our screens. As John Berger said if you don't look then you will not see and looking is a deliberate act of choice - the less we look the less choices we will have. As authoritarian regimes proliferate, we can examine what it is that we are being fed in our 'feeds' and realise that we have a responsibility to act to change the hegemony of the prevailing algorithms - not least the artists amongst us.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

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There are two sections to this book. The first features landscapes that frequently depict the artist's immediate environment in the mountains of the Serannia De Ronda located in the province of Andalucia, in Southern Spain. The landscape is rich, diverse and frequently dramatic with a climate to match. The Spanish word 'caprichoso' evokes this backdrop to the work, where intense saturated colours vie for your attention and make you feel just a little more alive than you were before. You could be standing on a cliff edge or walking amongst the oak trees with their hidden lives and secrets, in awe of their age and incredible longevity - they are unpossessable. There is a fierceness that both intimidates and attracts in equal measure. Inhospitable rocks face you with a determination and a solidity that almost render you helpless until you are uplifted by the majesty of them. You realise where you exist in the world. It does not undermine the sense of self, but rather connects you in a form of communion and enables an acceptance which for many has become eroded over time. Valleys gently lay their heads at the feet of mountains offering a respite from the savage crags, a solitary pine spreads her impressive beauty against the sky and desiccated beds of lime washed earth become huge angry torrents that brook no opposition. Embracing all is the iridescent light that bursts through clouds like canon fire and settles in the evening to a slumbersome pink.

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The figurative works make up the second half of the book inspired by friends and family, political events and wars or unanswerable questions. Sometimes there is an immediate impulse that hits the retina sending a flurry of urgent messages to the brain, sometimes it's the stomach creating a wave of nausea. The impulse can be emotional or visual, but both demand a response. An entire photographic library as well as watercolours, pastels and ink drawings lie behind the montages which are stitched together and worked over to be hewn into a new iteration. The importance of line cannot be underestimated - the intent is the maximum impact with the greatest simplicity. Abstraction is not the goal. Perspective is compressed but strangely references infinity at the same time, as if knowingly returning to the struggles of Paolo Uccello. ''...........if only he had spent as much time on human figures and animals as he spent, and wasted,on the finer points of perspective'' wrote Georgio Vasari. The figures with their keen outlines, the emphasis on the inclination of a head and the flat backgrounds are almost redolent of Cimabue and his pupil Giotto. The Early Renaissance is clearly an influence whilst there are also strains too of El Greco and Klimt and an occasional nod to Francis Bacon. Some works are related to specific events. The wars in Gaza and Sudan, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, displacement, migration and climate change can all be found in the following pages, but their ambivalence of context takes them beyond the historical and places them in the sphere of the human condition where they serve as an illuminator to our own interior landscapes. The conflicts and problems, we are given to understand, are eternal, but the solutions are there to be grasped and acted upon. It is possible to tell a different story. However, with the saturation of social media dominated by increasingly hegemonic algorithms the window of opportunity is closing. To use the euphemism, we need people to 'put their foot in the door' - time to put your hand up if you would like to be one of them.

The book covers the years 2023 - 2025 - perhaps some of the most significant years since the end of the second world war. We seem on some sort of irreversible path, but the past does teach us that the human condition does evolve and changes. The challenges though that we face at present are unlike those that have gone before, which requires us to be more rigorous, more vigilant and critical than ever.

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