In a career now of over four decades, Janet Nathan has been quietly putting together a body of work as impressive as it is substantial. It is the more remarkable, moreover, not just for its innate qualities of formal consistency and creative judgement, but most of all, perhaps, for its particularity. For while, as with all true artists, we may pick up in her work a reference here, a sympathy there, it remains entirely and unmistakeably her own.

Its physical nature serves only to emphasise this essential distinctiveness: for quite what do we call it? Assemblage, construction, collage, painting, sculpture, the found object – any one of these generic labels will do, up to a point, but only up to a point. They all have their place in the work, though not necessarily always all together. But there is rather more to it than that.

For we have only to add, to whichever term we choose, the qualification of ‘Relief’ to point the difference. For by its very nature, standing as it does on that debatable territory between the pictorial and the physical, the actual and the inferred, the ‘Relief’ is something of the odd-one-out of the plastic arts. Seen from the single viewpoint, with the wall as the ground or picture-plane against which to read it, the image remains at once both the object it is, and what you may imagine it to be.

So, with Janet’s work, we look into it on the one hand for the stuff itself, which is wood for the most part. The scraps and trophies, trawled from skip or shoreline (and regrettably harder to come by these days), she may well leave in their natural and distressed state and shape, yet is quite as likely to repaint and alter them. Then there are the elements she has cut or contrived herself, or cast in resin, to fit a particular formal requirement in the composition – a disc or crescent, a rod or serpent-shape. The colour is rich and deep – blues, reds, ochres, greys, or that of the wood itself, stained or vanished or just itself.

This formal challenge of the Relief, of reconciling the actual object with the pictorial, is met with a formidable assurance, yet is no mere formalist exercise in basic composition or design. For these shapes, more than mere shapes, are also instinct with an unspecific yet powerful symbolism, as one might find in the work of Miro, perhaps, or of Alan Davie or Terry Frost. What are they – suns, moons, snakes, rocks, rivers, lily pads, stepping stones? And what quite is this pictorial world they move into, or conjure up, this dreamscape set by that simplest of pictorial devices, an horizontal bar for skyline beneath the moon? There is to it, in short an odd surrealist ambiguity. Abstract? Figurative? Both at once? But if Janet Nathan is indeed a surrealist, it is of the gentlest kind.

William Packer, June 2011