Everything Soft Slowly Turned to Bone

There is a moment when something crumbles, when what was once pliable—soft, yielding—hardens
into something else entirely. A ruin is never just a ruin; it is a record of movement, of shifting ground,
of the slow work of erosion. This is the terrain Jane Hughes navigates.

This summer, The North Atlantic Lighthouse presents Everything Soft Slowly Turned to Bone, the first
exhibition of Hughes’s work in Denmark. Her paintings hold the quiet evidence of change, of
landscapes dissolving and reforming, of memories slipping into something less tangible. She is a
collector of traces: faded photographs, fragments of rock, the skeletal remains of places that were
once whole.
There are images here—ruins, tide-worn cliffs, moss creeping over stone—but they do not settle. They
shift, blur, dissolve into abstraction before reforming again. Hughes is interested in what lingers. The
holy wells, the forgotten forests, the islands that once held whole civilizations and now hold only the
weight of their ghosts. She is drawn to fossils, to the way they surface unexpectedly, offering proof
that something once existed. The arching forms that appear throughout her paintings are borrowed
from fossils she found on the Aran Islands, remnants of prehistoric creatures embedded in rock. They
drift from one painting to another like echoes, like the memory of an outline.
Hughes works with paint the way an archaeologist works with earth—layer by layer, uncovering
something just beneath the surface. She pieces her paintings together like a puzzle where half the
pieces are missing, constructing something whole from fragments. She is interested in deep time, in
the vast stretch of history that came before us, in the belief systems and rituals that shaped those who
walked these landscapes long before we did.
And yet, her paintings do not feel like relics. There is movement here, a pulse beneath the surface.
There is color—not the washed-out tones of nostalgia but something richer, something insistent.
Hughes does not recreate the past; she moves through it, dissolving borders between memory and
geography, between belonging and distance.
About The Artist
Jane Hughes (b. 1984, Ireland) lives and works in Finland, though before that, she spent more than a
decade in Berlin. She is a painter, though her practice expands into drawing, sculpture, and
installation. Always, she is looking for what remains.
She has exhibited internationally since 2005, beginning with a group exhibition in the Netherlands
while still a student. Recent solo exhibitions include We Gulp Dark Moons (Galleria Napa, Finland,
2024), These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins (TM•Gallery, Helsinki, 2023), and
Architecture of Emotions (Custom House Studios, Ireland, 2018). Her work has been shown in group
exhibitions in museums and galleries in Ireland, Germany, Sweden, France, Latvia, Russia, and beyond.
She has undertaken residencies at places that hold histories of their own—Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Co.
Monaghan, Ireland, 2022), Áras Éanna Arts Centre (Inis Oírr, Ireland, 2021), and Stundars Museum
(Finland, 2015). She studied at Aalto University in Helsinki, at UDK in Berlin, at the National College of
Art & Design in Dublin.
Her paintings are held in public collections: the Irish State Collection (Department of Foreign Affairs),
the Finnish National Gallery, the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, the National Irish Visual Arts
Library. Her current work is kindly supported by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Finland, for 2025.