“The 18 oil paintings in this exhibition are collectively titled with a quotation from Martin’s late husband Ewen McCuaig: The roses are just moving into Fabulosity. Half the paintings in Fabulosity are of roses grown in the garden at 21 Rose Avenue: Half are portraits of Ewen. While painted in 2009 they are of a time when he, like the roses, was just moving into fabulosity.”
From text accompanying the exhibition at The Redhead Gallery, February 3-27, 2010.
“What could be more ordinary (and yes, fine and balanced) than wallpaper? Jane Martin, in all her vast body of work from the 70s forward, grounded her painterly imagination with polite pattern. This resort to the particular through the lens of the universal evokes Freud’s notion of the uncanny where the familiar is haunted by the strange. Martin creates here a site where our unease, even dread, of corporeal inevitability is stilled and distilled in a domestic oneness where all could be imagined as well.”
Jean Bridge, “The Stunning Ordinary”. Stunning (catalogue), Rodman Hall Arts Centre, 2004.