Jane Bastion

REVIEW: Jane Bastion’s Ring Roads and Radiators — Portraits by Other Means

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Jane Bastion, known and admired for her stark, poetic silhouette portraits , each one a distilled meditation on identity, memory, and presence , has taken a bold detour with her latest project: “Ring Roads and Radiators: Three Tone Poems for Trumpet, Violin, and Euphonium.”

Gone (but not forgotten) are the black-cut figures against pale fields. In their place: sound. Not just sound, but a narrative impulse, one that reaches beyond the static frame. Bastion’s new tone poems don’t abandon her portraiture; they translate it , from shape to motion, from line to phrase, from silence to the echo of a brass note beneath a flyover.

A New Kind of Silhouette

For longtime followers of Bastion’s visual work, this will feel like both a departure and a continuation. These three pieces , performed by the lean, unexpected trio of trumpet, violin, and euphonium , are portraits too, but now rendered in sound. They don’t describe people, exactly. Instead, they conjure moments that feel like people: moods, selves, what might be called inner climates.

The inspiration, as Bastion has said, came from “the loops and lonelieness of the M25” and the symphonic storytelling of Richard Strauss. If that sounds contradictory , suburban motorways and late-Romantic decadence , that’s precisely where these tone poems live: in the tension between the banal and the operatic, the arterial and the intimate.

“Red on Rain-Soaked Concrete”

The opener starts with a stark trumpet motif , urgent, disoriented , over a scratchy violin line that feels more drawn than bowed. Then the euphonium enters like a slow breath of fog. You can almost see the wet pavement, the tail lights, the outline of a figure waiting by the barrier. It’s classic Bastion , not descriptive, but suggestive. A portrait not of a person, but of the space around them.

“Orbital Mythologies”

Here the Strauss influence is clearest. Themes circle and collapse, like cars on the outer loop. The trumpet postures, the violin teases, the euphonium grounds. There’s playfulness here, even satire. But underneath, as always in Bastion’s work, lies the sense of a watcher: someone seen just once in a mirror, or remembered from a blurred photo.

“White Underpass, Blue Light”

The final piece is the most abstract , and the most painterly. The violin scrapes across silence like chalk on metal. The euphonium speaks in half-phrases, slow and full of longing. The trumpet, at last, thins into near-nothingness. It’s a portrait of absence, of someone who’s already gone. The final minute is so delicate it feels like a drawing made with breath.

A New Chapter, Not an Abandonment

What’s remarkable is that Bastion hasn’t left her original medium behind , she still creates silhouette portraits, now sometime exhibited alongside these tone poems. The pairing is illuminating. The new works make you hear the portraits differently. The portraits make you see the music.

If her silhouettes were always about the edges of identity, these tone poems explore what happens inside those edges , the flux, the noise, the hidden narrative. This isn’t a reinvention. It’s an expansion.

Verdict

Jane Bastion’s first foray into music is a quiet revolution , not a rejection of her visual work, but a new voice for it. These tone poems are strange, spare, and haunting. With just trumpet, violin, and euphonium, she has carved sonic silhouettes that linger long after the final note.

Silhouette portraiture: the Regency’s equivalent of Instagram filters, only more dignified and less prone to bad lighting.

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Enter Jane Bastion, alias the “Queen of the Silhouette,” who has taken it upon herself to resurrect what she charmingly calls the “shade picture.” It’s a glorious throwback to an age when you didn’t look snarky on your phone,you just looked… a colour,on pale paper.

Back in the late 18th century, having your silhouette done was all the rage. Jane Austen? Almost certainly snagged one. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet? Portrayed in profile, naturally, before eloping. Bastion, however, prefers to distance herself from mere gimmicks. She insists on the term “shade picture.” In her words, “You think silhouette portraiture is incredibly easy? Then why aren’t you a world‑famous silhouettist, whose work hangs alongside collectors like Davide Plankton and Quentina Wrigly?”

To most of us, trim a profile from black card and stick it to white, voila. But Bastion begs to differ. She argues there’s an art to capturing the perfect Regency visage: the aristocratic tip of the nose, the curl of a chignon, the covert smirk suggesting one might moonlight as a clandestine duellist.

Bastion’s practice is part revival, part satire. She taps into the nostalgia for genteel intimacy,miniature likenesses traded among lovers,but also pokes fun at the solemnity of fine art. Her “shade pictures” look at once quaint and subversive. They’re Regency theatre in silhouette form: proper on the surface, risqué in spirit.

This playful revival is timely. In an era of glossy selfies, filters, and desperate attention-seeking, Bastion’s work reminds us that anonymity can be stylish. A carefully clipped profile invites imagination: who is the subject? What secrets do they harbour in their pointed jawline? You see nothing,and yet, everything.

Her commissions come with a lighthearted warning: “Attempt at period coiffure optional; emotional restraint mandatory.” Patrons are invited to strike a pose, turn left, and hold still,then surrender to Bastion’s scissors and discerning eye. What emerges is a delicate conversation between light and dark, presence and absence.

In short, Bastion is doing for silhouette what DJs did for vinyl: reviving an analogue aesthetic with ironic wit and discerning taste. Her work reminds us that sometimes less is more,especially when less is cut from black card by a master.

If Jane Bastion is indeed the Queen of the Silhouette, it’s because she reigns over an art that nearly vanished, infusing it with wit, charm and unexpected elegance. So next time you find yourself craving a break from the filtered façade of the digital age, consider sitting for a shade picture. You’ll leave looking dignified, mysterious,and just the right amount of Regency.

A Quiet Drama in Shadow: Jane Bastion’s ‘Silhouettes of Life’

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There is a hushed power in Jane Bastion’s new exhibition, Silhouettes of Life, currently on view at the Easton Rooms, a show composed entirely of silhouette portraits. At first glance, it may seem a modest proposal: profiles in bold colors cut sharply against pale grounds, an 18th-century form revived with restraint. But to spend time with Bastion’s work is to experience a quiet drama unfold,one that explores identity, intimacy, and memory through what is left unseen.

The opening night was unusually subdued for a private view, the usual rush of art-scene chatter replaced by a slower, more contemplative pace. Visitors moved along the walls in near silence, pausing, doubling back, squinting slightly, as if attempting to read the portraits not just as likenesses but as ciphers. The works do not shout. They wait.

Each silhouette, rendered with a delicacy that belies its apparent simplicity, becomes a study in presence and absence. Bastion has modernised the form with digital interventions and colour. She stays close to the tradition but pushes at its edges. A few portraits include slight deviations,a loosened strand of hair, a tilted hat brim, a shoulder slightly turned. In these subtle shifts, whole personalities emerge. A child’s profile, its line wavering with a hint of restlessness, sits beside the stern geometry of an older man whose high collar and straight spine suggest formality,or perhaps fear.

The genius of the exhibition lies in its refusal to explain. None of the works are titled with names. Instead, the pieces carry dates, locations, or phrases: April, West Window, Three Years After, She Didn’t Speak That Day. These fragments lend the works a narrative texture, encouraging the viewer to fill the void between what is given and what is implied.

This is not nostalgia, though there is an echo of the past in Bastion’s method. Rather, it is something more searching: a meditation on how we remember people, and how much we can ever truly know of them. The silhouettes ask not just “Who is this?” but “What remains of a person when all detail is stripped away?”

It is telling that several visitors returned to the same portraits more than once during the evening, drawn back to the suggestive emptiness of each shape. The lack of facial expression, of decorative context becomes its own form of invitation,to imagine, to remember, to project.

Bastion, whose previous works leaned more heavily into figuration and soft realism, has here committed to a discipline that might seem restrictive. Yet in that limitation she has found something expansive. Silhouettes of Life is a moving and, at times, unsettling exhibition that asks much of its viewer,not in terms of interpretation, but in attention. It rewards slowness.

There is a reason silhouettes once carried the weight of portraiture before photography. They offer not likeness, but presence. Bastion understands this deeply, and in this poised, meticulously constructed show, she gives us a gallery full of lives not captured, but traced,and in the tracing, remembered.