Current Work

Sewing Tutor is up and running! ... already planning new courses and Eventbrite is set up for booking current workshops. Got my new beautiful sewing machines, now working wonderfully on the finally finished workbench! New Sewing Tutor portfolio pages to plan and print, which each Learner receives, fabric to prepare for making samples, supplies to sort ... and ... tax return to do! Yippy! We’re there and getting there!

See the courses available on the Sewing Tutor page, and book your place on Eventbrite! 

For 1-2-1 workshops contact me on info@janehdee.com

  I started portrait studies whilst in east London, following hours spent photographing people and places which bought the significance of every person continually into focus. Sometime before, whilst showing my MA work (around negotiating a multicultural identity) and after a panel discussion, an audience member observed that after leaving the care system at 18 she also had to work out how her identity fit together, and that this was also the case for those fostered or adopted. 

More recently, and as part of the Reclaimed series, I have researched adoptees stories, some of whom were transracially adopted. The research was profound and repetitive themes which stood out were the need for permanence, the sense of not having a voice or agency and the need to be heard and listened to, attachment disorder, genetic heritage Vs new heritage, of being reclaimed from a wrong or no status, belonging vs isolation, that adoption was Gods idea of rescue, trauma, difference, inclusion. 

I have put this portrait on a door quite simply because adoption opens a new world to the adoptee. And part of that is having a voice (hence the microphone) which needs to be encouraged and heard. In that journey, where there is nurture & opportunity, resilience and strength can be forged (symbolised by the yakisugi prepared painting surface). The sitter for Reclaimed: Chosen, is Joy Carter, adoptee and adoption activist whose story and further research can be seen on www.AdoptionArena.com 

Reclaimed: Grafted - the construction of the bowl can be found in Portraits 

Cowal Kimono: Highland Spring  - can now be found in Intercultural Landscapes