Welcome to the first in our Meet the Artist series, where we step beyond the canvas, the stage, and the studio to explore the people behind the art. Today, we begin with someone whose creative output seems to live halfway between shadow and sound: Jane Bastion.
Jane doesn’t walk into a room,she drifts in, like a question you’re not sure how to answer. Known primarily for her evocative silhouette portraits and haunting musical tone poems, Jane’s work often lives at the intersection of quiet intensity and unresolved wonder. But who is she when she steps away from the paper and piano?
Outside the Frame
Despite the introspective, even brooding quality of her work, Jane herself is surprisingly warm and a little wickedly funny – she’ll quote an obscure 19th-century diarist in one breath and deliver a deadpan joke in the next. She lives in a small stone house tucked behind a row of beech trees somewhere in Dorset (though she refuses to share the precise location, joking, “Some of us need mystery the way others need vitamin D.”)
Her home smells faintly of beeswax and old books. There’s usually tea steeping,always black, never herbal,and something baking, though she claims not to enjoy cooking. “I cook only to avoid starving or speaking to strangers in supermarkets,” she says with a shrug.
She dresses like she was born in another era but has no interest in vintage trends – long linen skirts, heavy cardigans, and always something black. Never white. “White feels too loud,” she once said. You’ll never catch her in anything synthetic; she claims it interferes with her thinking. Most days, she wears soft leather boots and a tiny, tarnished silver pendant that no one has ever seen her remove.
Likes & Dislikes
She loves fog, fountain pens, and the sound of distant train whistles. She’s been known to stop conversations mid-sentence if a bird flies by – “Did you see that wingbeat?!” She’s fascinated by dreams, moss, shipwrecks, and the way light moves through stained glass.
She dislikes harsh lighting, hashtags, people who call art “content,” and when toast is sliced too thick. “Bread has a structure, you know. There’s a ratio. You can’t just ruin it with a dull knife.”
Where She Goes
Jane is a nomad of very specific destinations. She doesn’t travel broadly, but she travels deeply. She returns almost obsessively to the same handful of places: an abandoned pier in Whitby, a salt marsh in southern France, a graveyard in Prague, and an unnamed hill in Wales where she once saw a fox vanish as if swallowed by the earth.
She sketches constantly, not just in charcoal or pencil but in phrases. A phrase from her journal might later become the title of a musical piece, or the backbone of a new silhouette series.
The Art Itself
Her silhouettes often feature individuals in quiet tension with their environment: a child holding a lamp in a forest of swirling birds, a woman at a table, her shadow sipping tea without her. Her tone poems, composed for small ensembles, lean into ambiguity. They don’t crescendo,they hover. They don’t resolve,they disappear.
Jane is rumoured to be working on a novel,something fragmented, lyrical, and strange. She’s also begun recording field sounds,wind through shutters, owls calling across fields,and using them as compositional texture in her music. (She once performed a piece live using nothing but cello, whisper, and the ticking of a 1910 pocket watch).
When asked if she considers herself more musician or visual artist, Jane Bastion just smiled.
“I’m mostly a listener,” she said. “To shadows, to echoes, to things people don’t think are speaking.”
Stay tuned. Next month, we meet an artist who paints sound using color frequencies and refuses to own a phone.
Want to suggest an artist we should profile? Get in touch.
