JANE WILDGOOSE

ARTIST, WRITER, DESIGNER & KEEPER OF THE WILDGOOSE MEMORIAL LIBRARY

JANE WILDGOOSE is available as an artist, designer, writer/researcher, and consultant.

She is a NESTA Dream Time Fellow 2005-06.

During the Dream Time Fellowship Jane has been extending her work in The Wildgoose Memorial Library, with a view to its future development as an artist's installation in collaboration with an established collection/museum.

She has been photographing WML Readers and the WML collections in a series of portraits and still lifes that explore relationships between objects and memory. Developing her collaboration with Gregory Whitehead and Neil McCarthy, Jane has been conducting a series of interviews with Readers who have taken part in the WML Portrait Project, for an accompanying sound piece entitled At Home in The Wildgoose Memorial Library, edited and produced by Gregory Whitehead.

In 2005 Jane received The Victoria Rashbone Award as a Finalist in the Manchester Letherium Ideas Competition at the Cornerhouse, Manchester, for her submission of plans for a Wildgoose Memorial Library Annexe at the Manchester Letherium.

Jane is currently an Artists' Mentor for Commissions East in Cambridge (since 2004). She has been a Visiting Lecturer at Winchester School of Art since 1994, and a member of the School's MA Examination Board from 1997-2003. She is a Trustee of the Willis Fleming Historical Trust (since 2005).

Jane is one of seven artists commissioned by East Sussex NHS Hospitals Trust (Arts in Healthcare) to contribute to Spirit of Place - a web-based memorial to the recently closed All Saints Hospital, Eastbourne.

Jane trained in Fashion & Textiles at Winchester School of Art, and went on to work as a designer/maker for stage and film. She has collaborated with the writer Clive Barker (special effects costume designer, Hellraiser, New World Films, 1987; costume designer, the Dog Co., 1979-82); as costume and production designer with writer/director Alasdair Middleton (nine productions ranging from classical theatre to performance/installation including Gismonde of Salerne in Love, Aeschylean Nasty, Lachrymæ I and Polite Conversation at London venues including Battersea Arts Centre, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, the Arts Theatre, 1989-96); and with opera director Philip Parr (Spitalfields Market Opera, 1997; Millennium Festival, 2000). Associated research for these and other performance works - into representations of the body in dress, literature, and medical illustration - has led to articles and reviews in publications including The Independent; The Daily Telegraph; The New Statesman, GuardianSociety website, The Lancet, and for Anne Faggionato (Psycho exhibition 2000).

In 2002 Jane was co-host, with Dr Ruth Richardson, of a conference entitled The Business of the Flesh: Art, Science & Access to the Human Body, in association with Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford; she was guest speaker at Dead Body: Object, Art, Commodity? at the ICA (2001) and Morbid Fascination: the Body & Death in Contemporary Culture (Royal College of Physicians 2003). As part of her NESTA Dream Time Fellowship Jane is working with Dr Richardson to edit a book of the proceedings of The Business of the Flesh conference.

In 2001 Jane received a Wellcome Sciart Award with consultant gastroenterologist Dr. Peter Isaacs and Philip Parr to research and develop a medical and musical project inspired by Le Tableau de L’Opération de la Taille - a 3 minute musical composition with text, for bass viol and continuo, by Marin Marais - published in 1725, describing the operation to remove bladder stones. In Viewing the Instruments they investigated the medical, musical and social background to the Marais piece and presented their findings with six newly commissioned pieces of music and reflections on procedures to remove stones from the body today, in a UK performance tour funded by Arts Council England (2003). The project features as a chapter in Experiment: conversations in art and science, ed. Bergit Arends and Davina Thackara, The Wellcome Trust, 2003, and was featured on the BBC World Service Music Review (9.12.03).

During 2003 Jane was artist in residence at Maidstone Museum in Kent with visual artist Mary Hooper; they worked with the costume and natural history collections, and presented the exhibition Human Nature at the Museum in January- Mar. 2004 (featured: BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour 16.2.04).

Also in 2003 Jane was co-deviser of On One Lost Hair - a meditation on the post mortem fate of Horatio Nelson’s pigtail - with American playwright and radio artist Gregory Whitehead and producer Neil McCarthy for BBC Radio 4 (broadcast 10.5.2004); in 2005 Jane appeared in One Way to the Necropolis - a journey from Waterloo station in search of the Necropolis Railway, that ferried the metropolitan dead from Waterloo station to the vast suburban cemetery at Brookwood from the 1850s-1940s [BBC R4, producer Neil McCarthy, broadcast 7.2.05].

Other recent work includes two ‘Year of the Artist’ projects in 2000-2001: a residency with Mary Hooper at Bexhill Museum of Costume & Social History in Sussex, entitled A Rose Flowering by the Sea, and an exploration of collectors and collecting on the banks of the River Thames with artist Sally Hampson (Upstream exhibition, Trinity Hospital, Greenwich, 2001; featured: BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour 3.7.01).

Jane continues to develop her occupation as Keeper of The Wildgoose Memorial Library.

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