About
Jane Forrest (b. 2005) is an artist and curator working between New York City and Toronto. She is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Through materially intensive and repetitive processes, her practice considers labor as a form of endurance and care. Working across mosaic, painting, and sculpture, she examines how memory becomes embedded in domestic architecture through the accumulation of fragments, touch, and pressure. Her work has been exhibited at the Orillia Museum of Art & History, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Royal Ontario Museum. In 2025, she presented a solo exhibition Gentle Enough to Hold at Gagné Contemporary.
Jane wishes to thank The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for its financial support.
Artist Statement
Some things arrive before we have language for them—felt through presence, outline, atmosphere. My work begins in that space: drawn to aesthetic qualities that carry their own urgency.
Working across painting, ceramics, mosaic, printmaking, and drawing, my practice emerges through sustained, material labor and is shaped by literary, historical, and personal references. Labor itself holds meaning—not only as a means to an end, but as endurance and devotion enacted through repetition, assembly, and pressure.
The works function as documents of a climate—personal, political, and material—embedded in domestic scale and architectural fragments shaped by touch and wear. Rather than capturing what is, the work considers how we endure—through beauty, labor, language, and perspective.
- Forrest, 2026
