Gather…Arrange…Maintain is a focused survey drawn from a thirty-year period of the work of the contemporary Canadian artist Jane Buyers. Consistently moving between a variety of media and processes in drawing, sculpture and printmaking, her work has investigated wood, steel, plaster, paper, bronze, found objects and porcelain.
Trained in the era of Minimalism and Conceptualism, Buyers remains attracted to the physicality of material and to process as agency. Much of her work foregrounds labour in which repetition at a slow pace gradually creates a surface or builds a form. Fusing the organic with the artificial, Buyers searches for a synthesis of materials and forms to speak of opposing desires and representational tensions. Buyers’ work consistently evokes human presence through a poetic use of surrogate objects and forms.
Her early work is rich with references to domestic proxies such as garments and architecture, while tools and books have reappeared in a number of various bodies of work over time. Frequent references to natural forms, such as a leaf, a flower or a tree, are often gathered from domestic sources, such as textiles and ceramics, which serve both utilitarian and decorative purposes. These romanticized, artificial representations are significant to Buyers as reflections of impulses of manipulation and idealization, expressive of a desire to be connected, to make order, and to find meaning in our surroundings.