Mary Jane Orley

CONTEMPORARY ARTIST

My practice involves drawing, painting, conceptual sculpture, and installation. Over the last eight years, I have been exploring ways of defining and realising notions of emptiness and my work attempts to express the relationship between matter and space, between thing and no-thing, between the visible and invisible.

I trained with the painter Jane Greenham in the 1970s and the artist and poet Cecil Collins in the 1980s.  Since returning to Guernsey in 2000, I have enjoyed studying with artists Eric Snell, Martin Purvis, Mark Cook and Anita Davies, who have inspired me to branch out into working with a much broader range of materials. 

 I have held group and solo exhibitions in the UK, Switzerland, France and Guernsey. I have been commissioned to produce numerous portraits and still life paintings, as well as medical illustrations for the World Health Organisation.