On Common Ground | The Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals — No. 21

Before Jane Kitching spoke so beautifully, at the opening, about Common Ground, the title had already begun to make sense.

A remarkable number of friends had travelled up from Yorkshire for the opening. Talking to them over the course of the evening, I gradually realised that many had, at one time or another, lived in the same village as Jane. Some had first known the family through the parish, where Jane’s husband was once the vicar. He had married some of their children. Parishioners had become friends, friends had become part of family life, and years later here they all were, several hours from home, gathered again in an Edinburgh gallery.

Common Ground I, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 79 x 79 cm

Community can be one of those words that becomes rather abstract through overuse. That evening, it wasn’t abstract at all ­– it was people making the journey.

And that seems a good place to begin with Common Ground, because Jane describes the exhibition as being about connection:

 “the places we know, the people we meet, our memories, our experiences, and those small moments that are part of all our lives.”

A family gathered around a kitchen table. Friends meeting for coffee. Sitting at a bar looking out across the city. And, as Jane rather generously added when she spoke at the opening, perhaps even coming to your favourite gallery.

Across The Table, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 56 x 56 cm

There is a table at the heart of much of Jane’s work. Sometimes people gather around it. Sometimes it separates them. Sometimes a lone figure holds space. It might belong to a café, a kitchen or a restaurant, but Jane has returned to the table repeatedly as a way of exploring togetherness and isolation, hope and grief – all those things that makes us uniquely human.

Tables are where we eat, argue, celebrate, work, talk and sit quietly with one another. Over time they become witnesses to family life. The table itself remains much the same; everything around it changes.

Holding Space, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 81 x 81 cm

Jane’s own journey to painting has been similarly layered. Born in Assam in 1961, to missionary parents, she grew up and continues to live and work in North Yorkshire. When Jane talks about her love of colour, she traces at least some of it back to those early years.

And colour is difficult to miss in these paintings. Pinks, oranges, blues and greens move through familiar interiors and Edinburgh streets. Jane talks about wanting that colour to convey joy and energy, but the paintings are not simply cheerful. There is enough ambiguity in them to allow quieter emotions to sit underneath.

Jane's workspace in North Yorkshire

Her route into art was not straightforward either. Jane’s first degree was in microbiology, and she worked as a microbiologist before deciding to pursue a creative career. She went on to study Textiles and Surface Pattern at Cleveland College of Art and Design and founded Trinity Designs Ltd, building a wildly successful career as a textile designer that took her to New York, Atlanta, Frankfurt and Brussels.

That earlier experience has never really left the paintings. Jane builds her surfaces in stages. Collage comes first, followed by charcoal, oil pastel and crayon. Printmaking patterns are introduced and oil paint layered over them. Marks disappear and re-emerge; patterns sit beneath other patterns; one process leaves traces inside the next.

There is something particularly appropriate about that way of working for an exhibition concerned with memory. Places accumulate layers too.

A café becomes attached to the a first date with a person who becomes the love of your life. A street becomes interwoven in our life story. A kitchen table carries years of meals and gatherings that are no longer visible when you look at it. The present sits on top of everything that came before without entirely erasing it.

Jane deliberately allows something similar to happen in her paintings. I can personally say, she has succeeded greatly in this endeavour, each piece contains so much to see and continue to discover. The figures in these paintings do not have to remain strangers, Jane supplies the scene, but she doesn’t tell us exactly what to think about it.

That relationship between people, memory and place has appeared particularly beautifully elsewhere in Jane’s recent work. In 2024/25 she became Artist in Residence at St Mary’s College, Durham University, as the college celebrated 125 years since its foundation. Jane’s mother had graduated from St Mary’s in 1948. More than seventy years later, her daughter returned there as its artist in residence.

On Campus, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 56 x 56 cm

It is difficult to imagine a better example of the sort of connections running through Common Ground: generations crossing one another, memories attaching themselves to places, and buildings acquiring meanings far beyond their bricks and mortar.

By the end of the opening, I found myself thinking again about all those friends who had travelled from Yorkshire.

Jane Kitching, working in her studio in North Yorkshire.

The paintings may begin with Jane’s experiences, observations and memories, but the exhibition is really concerned with something larger. Not the idea that all our lives are the same — they obviously aren’t — but that so much of them happens within familiar structures.

Homes. Streets. Church. Tables. Neighbourhoods. Friendships. Families.

The places where lives overlap.

Our common ground.