Jane Prophet was born in Birmingham in 1964 but works and lives in London. Her work includes large-scale installations (Conductor, Wapping Art; The Landscape Room, Norwich; Decoy, Blickling Hall), digital prints and objects. Her art reflects her interest in science, technology and landscape. Prophet works across disciplines on a number of internationally acclaimed projects that have broken new ground in art, technology and science. She is currently a NESTA Dream Time Fellow, spending a year developing her interdisciplinary collaborations. She was until recently Professor of Visual Art and New Media and Co-Director of the Centre for Arts Research, Technology and Education at the University of Westminster.

Souvenir of England
Meadow Gallery commission (2007)

Since they were first made in 1898 to commemorate the building of the Eiffel tower, Snow globes, have been used as mementos to encapsulate key landmarks. They have become the quintessential souvenir object, now slightly outdated and nostalgic themselves. Shaking them brings the scene to life for a brief and artificial moment of suspended disbelief. This dome is a memento to the English orchard which is fast becoming an endangered species. The apple tree in the globe died back in a commercial orchard, its contorted shape the result of specific pruning. Kite’s orchard, where the dome stands, has been replanted recently with old varieties of pear trees to try to revive or preserve this feature which has come to embody a bygone era. Our attachment to such features raises questions about nostalgia and sentimentality.

The Landscape Room
Five digital photographic prints
Courtesy of the artist (2001)

The five large digital images which constitute The Landscape Room makes reference to the room of the same name at Holkham Hall which is hung with a precious collection of landscape paintings by Poussin, Claude and Salvator Rosa. These reflect the fascination of the time with majestic natural landscapes and the wilderness as an ideal. A taste which in the late 18c gave rise to the concept of the picturesque landscape. In 1789 the foremost landscape designer of the time Humphry Repton, created one of his earliest famous Red Books with coloured ‘before’ and ‘after’ designs for Thomas Coke of Holkham Hall. In The Landscape Room, Jane Prophet uses a digital overlay technique to combine photographic images with computer generated versions of the grounds at Holkham Hall. Complexe mathematical models were used to “grow’ trees and terrain. The result is an idealised digital landscape, whose aesthetic is controlled by the artist and computer programmer.