Jan Blythe
Instagram: @dumbrecksix
Website: https://www.janblythe.com
Bio: Born in Scotland, Jan was raised in Glasgow, a city with a strong arts and culture heritage. A painter early on she decided to train as a textile designer and received her BA in England before moving to California. After building a successful business as a surface designer Jan decided to return to her first love, fine art. She earned her MFA from the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute. Her work in solo and group shows has been exhibited in Scotland, England, Cyprus, Chicago, Missouri, New York, New Jersey and throughout California.
Statement: **Artist Statement**
My practice explores memory, belonging, and the ways personal and collective histories become embedded within everyday materials. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, I transform found domestic objects, textiles, natural materials, and wax into works that examine identity through inheritance, migration, ritual, and loss.
I am drawn to materials that carry traces of previous lives. Through processes of collecting, stacking, stitching, casting, and repair, familiar objects are transformed into sculptural forms that speak to both absence and presence. Recurring motifs of the house, the vessel, and the fragment become metaphors for home, the body, and the fragile nature of memory.
Rather than offering fixed narratives, my work invites reflection on how we carry the past with us, asking how ordinary materials can become repositories for memory, resilience, and belonging.
