East Durham Artists Network & Gallery

Jac earned her MA in Fine Art in Sunderland and took early retirement from a thirty year career in art teaching to concentrate on developing her own work. 

She lives on the Durham coast in the north east of the UK, a coast blessed by a unique geology and blighted by industry. She is constantly inspired by its moods and materials, its physical geography and social history.  ​  She draws, photographs, paints, prints, stitches, writes, and assembles found objects, using any medium which feels appropriate to capture the essence of items that demand her attention. 

She is interested in detail and surfaces, extracting small nuances found in nature or man-made objects, gathers things that speak of their past  .  

Working with a mixture of materials allows her to experiment with ideas, choosing a material to work with that best reflects a physicality, a feeling or an expression is a key part of her working process. Finished pieces are an accumulation of these processes, marks and ideas, traceries of the passing of time. Works that ask you to notice the un-noticed.  ​  

Drawing is a fundamental part of her practice and helps her ‘see’. When recording starts to feel too literal, painting with encaustic, drawing with threads, or assembling collagraph plates to print from allows her to re-visit her favourite coastal motifs in a more abstract way.  ​  

Making work that allows room for the audience to participate is of increasing importance as her art journey progresses.  ​  www.jac-howard.co.uk