Jan Downes: Staring into the Sun

“I look into the sun, then I look away. From behind closed eyelids, intensely coloured forms and jagged lines appear. These are afterimages: negative colours that haunt the visual cortex after exposure to a bright stimulus.

This body of work considers the multisensory impressions that remain after contact with the world. In our daily transactions with light, with colour, with touch, with sound, translations occur: between the spoken and the heard, the touched and the felt, the projected and the seen. What remains after each encounter, is a new and subjective form of it.”

—Jan Downes              

Gallery LNL is delighted to present Staring into the Sun, a solo exhibition of ceramic works by Jan Downes. These works result from a novel process of ceramic making, with Downes pouring porcelain into stitched cloth vessels suspended in space. Within the kiln the cloth burns away, leaving only the porcelain body underneath. The resulting works bear the outline of cloth: billowing out from their centres, as sheet folds crease and twist up their exteriors, to quietly bunch and hold at the base, never quite settling from their suspension, tip-toe. Produced as they are from this contact with flame, porcelain and fabric, Downes’ work serves as a meditation on afterimage: the trace left behind from our contact with the world. 

Jan Downes holds a Masters of Fine Art from The University of Newcastle, where she taught Art Education and Ceramics from 1995 to 2012.  Downes has been selected as finalist for a number of awards, including the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize (2023), the North Queensland Ceramics Prize (2024 finalist; 2016 winner) and the Gosford Ceramic Prize (2023).