Life, what’s it all about? Well, in Jane Hayes Greenwood’s latest series, it’s reduced down to its most fundamental and primal elements: birth and death.
It starts with ancient-looking ceramics, four clay pots in a vitrine. Some are pierced and broken, some are shaped like women with multiple breasts, as if Hayes Greenwood has just dug up some prehistoric fertility charms. Those ceramics appear all over the soft, airy, dreamy paintings. Women’s bodies curve in on themselves to form vessels, they become pots, vases to carry floral loads on their backs. The female figures are lifting, holding, maintaining these flowers that are on the verge of withering.
Where Hayes Greenwood’s previous work was full of love hearts and bright pink, now it’s full of the weight of motherhood, the pain of mourning. Despite their soft focus haze and pastel colours, these are heavy works, weighed down with responsibility and love, and pain and grief too; elemental, primal feelings that we all have to reckon with after the blush of youth fades.
They’re lovely paintings about the most basic of things, that’s why they’re so affecting. Life, it’s just birth and death with a bit of shagging in the middle.