Janet Biard

About

Janet Biard’s painting practice explores the material and performative aspects of making paintings. She takes inspiration from her deep connection to the Gloucestershire landscape as a site shaped by memory, absence, and material transformation. Her work draws on industrial archaeology, lost sounds, and layered histories, translating these into abstract fields of colour, gesture, and form.

Her process is durational and cyclical, grounded in the physical manipulation of paint. Surfaces are built through accumulations of oil and acrylic, then worked back through sanding, scraping, and erosion. Earlier marks are revealed, obscured, or partially erased, allowing absence to operate as an active presence within the work. From these layered surfaces, geometric forms emerge, only partially defined and slipping across the surface. The resulting works hold a tension between fluid, atmospheric space, and bold chromatic structures.

Biard’s paintings remain open and provisional, holding multiple temporalities in suspension while resisting fixed resolution.