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HEATHER JANSCH IS known for her magnificent life-size driftwood horses at the Eden Project. I first met her over twenty-five years ago and will never forget the day we were talking about horses, when she suddenly started whinnying and trotting round the room! It was as if, in that moment, she was an arab filly.
At that time, she was mostly a painter, doing horse portraits for private clients. These pictures were remarkably accurate representational depictions – almost photographic in their realism. She was, however, getting bored with doing them. She was looking for a way forward.
She occasionally came to stay with me, and played with clay in my studio. One day she rushed in with something, quite breathless and full of enthusiasm. When she took the covering cloth away she presented a horse made with chicken wire. It was her first work in three dimensions. Her voice was bubbling with possibilities; she was so excited to be working sculpturally, and felt liberated and full of energy.
In a way, she was returning to making things, something she first discovered in childhood. She had wanted a pet rabbit, and her father had told her that she could have one if she made a hutch for it, and they had discussed the design and he had taught her how to use tools and make one.
The next horses after that first chicken-wire one were made with copper wire, so she was sort of drawing the horse in the air. They were about two feet tall, and gradually Heather started incorporating bits of sea-washed glass, and occasionally small bits of driftwood and other materials. But her work really took off when she started working life-size. To find enough driftwood she has a helper who trawls the nearby coast after storms to find the sea-soaked bits and pieces. She loves the way the sea softens and sculpts the forms for her.
FROM HER YEARS as a painter, Heather knows horses inside out. She can improvise with the form from a position of great knowledge. Intuition does not work in a vacuum. It needs experience, and understanding. When someone has internalised knowledge to the extent that it is second nature, the opportunities for rich improvisation are endless. I am sure that is why people find her driftwood horses so powerful: they can see that they are representations that have a core of supreme understanding, and can appreciate the playfulness and improvisation because of that.
The animal works of Heather’s that I most admire, however, are her smaller bronze horses. They are less accurate. The rumps and bodies are exaggeratedly large and the heads are smaller, which gives them monumentality. She says that she was inspired by the Chinese T’ang horses, and her work does have that archetypal quality. Each bronze piece represents all horses, not just one horse as her driftwood ones do.
Heather has also made some remarkable figures based on the human form. I think these are her best work, some of them made at a turbulent time in her life when she gave full vent to her feelings. They express aggression, anger and rage. We do not see this often in work by women, and it is important that it is seen so that we can feel less alone if we have those feelings. And like a true artist she can express these feelings with a sense of beauty. Her playful inventiveness is still there of course; one driftwood figure has as a breast a bicycle bell that rings.
Her latest project, a major installation on show in Trento, Italy, was inspired by watching the Grand National and seeing those heroic animals making the huge jumps. She has made a series of suspended life-size horses that appear to be flying through the air. It has been so successful that the town, which is building a new art gallery, has bought the entire exhibition and is building a gallery especially for it so that it can remain on permanent show. What a buzz for an artist! It is the Museo de Scienze Naturali di Trento and will open in 2010.
For more information please visit www.heatherjansch.com
