Jane was the first artist to take part in the Research Art Lab residency programme in the Power House on Orford Ness.

During the First World War research and trials took place on Orford Ness to find effective camouflage colour palettes and patterns on day and night flying machines, including painted aeroplane body work and wings. Experiments were largely based on observation, trial and error in relation to the landscape and viewpoints from above and below. Jane spent three weeks painting in this strange landscape, observing and recording a contemporary seasonal colour palette of the vegetated shingle and marshland found below the horizon line.

The body of work draws on Jane’s firsthand physical and visual experience of the landscape. It is made in and of the site. She worked quickly observing and mixing a series of colours that she then used to create small and largescale paintings. The works developed instinctively with intuitive, quick mark-making made by brush on saturated canvas and paper. Her first works Observation Orford Ness and Research Art Lab Camouflage Colour Palette, Orford Ness used watercolour and this watery way of working informed the later larger scale acrylic on paper and raw unstretched canvas: Wingspan. She then returned the work into the landscape to photograph it within this vast desert-like space. WIngspan was animated by the wind and dwarfed by the environment which it references and in which it was made.

JANE WATT PROJECTS

Projects