Artist Bio (2025)
Jane Forrest (b. 2005) is an artist and curator based between New York City and Toronto. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her practice explores labor as a form of endurance, employing labor-intensive processes across a range of mediums to examine themes of memory, time, and history. She has exhibited her work at the Orillia Museum of Art & History, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Royal Ontario Museum. She had a solo exhibition titled Gentle Enough to Hold at Gagné Contemporary until August 2nd 2025.
Jane wishes to thank The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for its financial support.
Some things arrive before we have language for them—felt through presence, outline, atmosphere. My work began in that space: holding aesthetic qualities, but carrying its own kind of urgency.
Working across painting, ceramics, mosaic, printmaking, and drawing, my practice emerges from sustained labor and is shaped by literary, historical, and personal references. My work is grounded in a process where labor itself holds meaning, not just as a final result but a form of endurance and a kind of devotion. Beauty, in this context, isn’t an escape from criticality—it’s a tool. It distracts, invites, wounds, heals. It holds.
The works function as documents of a climate—personal, political, and material—embedded in domestic scale, architectural fragments, and the body’s relation to use and wear. Rather than capturing what is, the work imagines how we endure—through beauty, labor, perspective, language, and poetry.
- Forrest, 2025
