Freelance artist/designer/writer
www.janewildgoose.co.uk

Jane Wildgoose trained in Fashion/Textiles at Winchester School of Art (BA Hons 1977). Current practice has developed from diverse work for theatre, performance and film. From 1979-81 she was Costume Designer for 5 productions by Clive Barker’s Dog Co, and also Special Effects Costume Designer for Barker’s first film Hellraiser (New World Films 1986). Work with Barker included research into the anatomical works of Vesalius for costume reference for Hellraiser, and for his play The History of the Devil (York and Albany Theatre London 1980). She collaborated with the writer/director Alasdair Middleton in theatre and performance/installation from 1989-96 - as Designer: The Maids Tragedy, The Way To Win Him, Aeschylean Nasty (Battersea Arts Centre 1989-91), Polite Conversation (performance piece Rebecca Hossack Gallery 1992); Endgame (Arts Theatre 1993); Barnaby Downing (New End Theatre Hampsteaôd 1993); Gismonde of Salerne in Love (BAC 1994); and as Co-Deviser/Designer of the installation/performance Lachrym¾ I (Freedom Café 1996) - the last was a culmination of work developed in the collaboration, and set a precedent for ongoing work which is now connected by research into representations of the body/transience, using contemporary forms to re-present historical findings.

In 1997 she was commissioned by Philip Parr to design two productions for Spitalfields Market Opera: the children’s opera Sid The Serpent Who Wanted To Sing, and Don John of Austria. In 2000 they were commissioned as Director and Designer respectively of the Rotherham Millennium Musical at Clifton Park Rotherham, and the Millennium Dome Greenwich.

Over the last two years Parr and Wildgoose have been collaborating to research and develop the continuing Lachrym¾ series started with Middleton. This collaboration led to Viewing the Instruments and the award of a Wellcome Sciart Prize 2001/02 to research & develop the projöect with gastroenterologist Dr Isaacs. Wildgoose has been Project co-ordinator for Viewing the Instruments over the past 12 months.

In 1998 research for Lachrym¾ III (into symbols of transience associated with Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations) led to Wildgoose being commissioned to design and make props/textiles for Miss Havisham’s wedding breakfast for the BBC’s production of Great Expectations. In 2000 she received a Year of the Artist Award (South East Arts in association with the Arts Council of England) as Artist in Residence (with Mary Hooper) at Bexhill Museum of Costume & Social History in Sussex, where she continued her research into flowers/transience/Miss Havisham with the Museum’s collection of wedding clothes and accessories. As a result of this residency she and Hooper have been offered an exhibition at Maidstone Museum & Bentlif Art Gallery in 2004, to work with their Costume and Natural History collections.

Further research for the Lachrym¾ series, into the history of ÷collecting and cabinets of curiosities, led to collaboration with Sally Hampson in 2001 in the Year of the Artist project Upstream (London Arts in Association with the Arts Council of England). They exhibited the work at Trinity Hospital Greenwich (July 2001). Radio 4 Woman’s Hour featured the project, and interviewed Hampson and Wildgoose on the Thames foreshore. Wildgoose holds a Port of London Authority Permit to Search & Dig on the Thames Foreshore.

Research for Lachrym¾ IV, into the history of artists and anatomy, has led to published articles and reviews in The Independent, Daily Telegraph, Guardian website, Lancet, and New Statesman (1997-2002), and commissions to write exhibition catalogue essays: for Psycho: an investigation of different kinds of focus on the body and its parts (Anne Faggionato 2000); and for Birthdays (291 Gallery London 1999).

Wildgoose was a guest speaker/panel member at the ICA debate Dead Body: Object, art, commodity? in November 2001. She has received funding (from Pöfizer) in collaboration with medical historian and broadcaster Dr Ruth Richardson to present a conference The Business of the Flesh to bring together artists, doctors, legal experts, ethicists, medical and art historians, and other interested parties to consider rights to possession and exhibition of the human body by science and the arts; currently under discussion with Ruskin College, Oxford. [Took place in assn with Ruskin in Oxford, Nov. 2002].

She has held teaching posts at various art colleges since 1979, and is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Winchester School of Art in the Textile Art Dept (since 1995) and for the Textile Design MA where she is also an Internal Assessor (since 1997). She was a part-time Lecturer in the History of Art Dept at WSA from 1994-5.

From 1983-95 Wildgoose was a Visiting Lecturer in the Tapestry Dept at the Royal College of Art, and also part-time technician in the Dept from 1985-95, continuing as Visiting Lecturer in Mixed Media Textiles at the RCA from 1995-9.