Jane Frederick’s work explores the intrigue of historical houses and gardens and their enduring ability to provoke wonder and awe.

Following in the footsteps of American writer Edith Wharton, she has travelled Italy ‘garden seeking’ the great formal gardens examined in Wharton’s influential book Italian villas and their gardens.
Her large painterly prints pursue the elusive ‘old garden magic’ that Wharton argues is imbued within those celebrated gardens and their adjoining properties, originally designed to harmonise the home, garden and the wilderness beyond.

In the studio Jane builds complex monotypes layering saturated veils of colour disrupting the visual clarity of those gardens and rooms. The waters flowing in the fountains do not run clear and the spaces within the villas are not easily accessed. These enigmatic spaces exist at the mercy of their keepers, as nature strives to grow free from the constraints of man, shaping and taming the environment.

Jane Frederick completed an M.A. Printmaking at Cambridge School of Art in 2009. She is currently leading the Garden Seekers Project as Artist in Residence with Essex Gardens Trust. Exhibitions include the Muse Gallery, London in 2021 and Artist in Residence at Hamilton MAS in Felixstowe in 2020.