Jan Creelman
2022, Artist In Residence
“My experience at the Caetani Centre continues to inform my work and particularly since I moved to Vancouver Island. In practical terms, I’m working larger than I used to, and conceptually, thinking deeper. It gave me a confidence I didn’t know I had. I subsequently was invited to the Atacama Desert in Chile for a residency this spring, and next fall, to another in Portugal.”
Artist's Statement
My mission is to help you process your world by providing a different lens through which you can “make sense” of living. To always invite you out into a much larger world than you might have imagined you belonged to in the first place.
I try to generate thinking and emotions through the process of movement interacting with resistance. My work positions contrasting elements together, pushing and pulling each other with the wild rapture of our unpredictable worlds or moments, however glorious or dark. Art is organic and dynamic – it is always shifting for both the artist and the viewer, continuously active, incomplete, but always becoming. I hope you, the viewer will experience something unexpected and find a new adventure propelling you forward through your day.
Core Technique
The batik technique strictly involves applying hot wax to an organic substrate, such as cotton, by various means. I further develop this concept with the use of anything that will seal the medium it encounters, so when dyes are introduced they will only permeate those areas that contain no "resists". The new dried, dyed areas are then also resisted to seal the new colour, more dye is added and the process is repeated. In the end, I remove the resists and the resulting images emerge. I use Procion MX dyes, well known for their depth and longevity of colour.
Tumbling (Batik on cotton, 4.6x1.2m), 2022: A journey in life involves some scrambling and tumbling around, exploring along the way. “Tumbling", is very large batik at 2.6m wide, came from an exuberance of energy and joy while at the Caetani Centre where the space was large enough to accommodate its size.
Silence: The Graveyard of Certainty. (Photograph of the shadow of an art piece on a wall), 2024. (Residency in Chile) Silence, like a whisper, does not necessarily announce itself out loud. But it lingers and can murmur regret for several, or all of our remaining days. Yet, we know what to do; what needs to be said. Silence is ever fluid; a story never fully told but, one way or another, it never abandons us. It speaks out loud and announces its presence through the shadows of our lives, in a graveyard of certainty. For its effect is quite undeniable. This piece represents that air and time. It is the shadow of a carved piece, that is absorbed by it’s substrate on a particular day, at a particular time. It can never be duplicated as such, but like silence, it certainly exists and lays in repose. Much like the quiet and permeation of a graveyard.
We Used to Have a Cabin Here (Batik on ginwashi, 61x61cm) 2024.
The Dance Between the Earth and the Ancient Skies (Batik on ginwashi, 61x70cm), 2023.
“Just a Matter of Time.” Gallipoli, 25 April, 1915. Is he holding a compass, or a pipe, or a trinket from his sweetheart? (Batik on ginwashi, 41x51cm), 2024.