Jane Hayes Greenwood
Weird Weather
23 January - 7 March 2026
Co-presented with Ione & Mann, 1st Floor, 6 Conduit Street, W1S 2XE
Images / Press Release
Weird Weather presents a new body of landscape paintings and drawings that expand the artist’s long-standing exploration of charged, anthropomorphic forms into the atmospheric scale of land and sky. Drawing on the hills and weather systems of her West Yorkshire childhood, these works treat landscape not as scenery but as a psychological and bodily field, where emotion, memory and environment become entangled.
Swelling clouds, straining geographies and corporeal weather formations register moments of wonder, turbulence and loss, shaped by the artist’s experience of grief and heightened attention to the natural world. These new works extend Hayes Greenwood’s interest in systems under pressure, where internal states spill outward and the land and atmosphere take on expressive force. Positioned within a lineage of Romantic landscape painting and engaging with striking and surreal natural phenomena, the works reflect a contemporary moment in which emotional and climatic instability increasingly mirror one another.
Speaking about the work, Hayes Greenwood says “These paintings expand out of a kind of grief logic, a process I have found to be prismatic - where ecstatic love, deep pain, gratitude, and acceptance can all wildly coexist within the same psychedelic minute. Crazy weather and the Calder Valley landscapes of my childhood have become anthropomorphised in these works, attempting to express the scale of deeply felt emotion as it shifts through the body and spills into the world.”
Ben Street Essay
What do clouds in paintings do; what are they for? Writing about a billowing formation in a ceiling fresco by Antonio da Correggio, the philosopher Hubert Damisch claimed that it “contradicts the very idea of outline and delineation, and through its relative insubstantiality constitutes a negation of solidity, permanence and identity.” Put differently, clouds are the nothing that makes a something. They’re the absence at the centre of knowing: the hole in the doughnut. Damisch’s painted clouds come to stand for indeterminacy in and of itself, a point that won’t be lost on any viewer of work by (for instance) Emily Carr, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Burchfield, and Jane Hayes Greenwood. In Hayes Greenwood’s recent paintings, which inaugurate something new in her work – namely, great swoops and curves of cloud above undulating English landscapes – this tendency towards the transitory and impermanent is made clear. Just as they do in those other artists’ works, clouds manifest an encounter with the unknowable.
Yet Hayes Greenwood’s clouds don’t just float, they flex. Alternately muscular and gloopy, they perform their weird arabesques above the fields and farms of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, the artist’s childhood home. It’s this geographic specificity, with its attendant emotional and nostalgic force, that returns me for the moment to Damisch’s writing and its account of the dissembling effect of all that cloud. The clouds of Correggio, studded with the waving limbs of the saved, are for him a destabilising agent, leaving “fragmentary, split-up figures drowning in a mass of…indefinite cloud.” Let me misread Damisch a bit and think of that in the emotional terms Hayes Greenwood’s paintings insist upon. Made in the aftermath of intense personal grief, her paintings reimagine cloud as inflected differently: as the manifestation of an emotive force that can’t help but leave a person fragmentary, split-up, with “solidity, permanence and identity” upended. No wonder her paintings feel woozy and unmoored.
In March 2025, Hayes Greenwood travelled back to West Yorkshire to take care of her mother for what were to be the last weeks of her life. It was only after returning to her studio in south-east London that Hayes Greenwood began to produce the landscapes that make up this new body of work. (I think of this as the clouds clearing). In Variable Becoming Cyclonic, an architecture of curls and arches looms above the fields below. The landscape, parcelled out in tidy segments, is a delineated, known terrain, made more so in contrast with the wild bouquet of shapes above it. Yet for all the litheness of its forms, the precision of Hayes Greenwood’s description of the cloud draws it closer. Forget indeterminacy and vagueness: theseclouds feel, like Tiepolo’s, close enough to take hold of, to plunge a hand into. When Philip Guston painted clouds, he did them like floating boulders, wittily inverting their weight and density. Guston (a frequent reference point for Hayes Greenwood) might help clear the air here. What’s at play isn’t contradiction but what he himself sought in painting and saw as its special territory: the ability to say many different things at the same time. To be, that is, light and heavy, playful and serious, transcendent and earthly, all within the same painting. This, perhaps, is the thread that runs through the work of many of the artists whose postcards pepper the walls of Hayes Greenwood’s studio, William Blake, Stanley Spencer, and Edvard Munch among them. Munch’s The Sun (1910-11) translates thin Nordic sunlight into a nuclear blast of radiant beams, investing the immaterial with the physicality of the tactile world. This doubling effect is also a quality of clouds. They’re at once doomy portents of heavy weather, and tokens of delicacy and tenderness, like wallpaper in a child’s bedroom. Being many things at once is cloud’s special territory too. They’re weird that way.
The same year of Hayes Greenwood’s loss saw the appearance of mammatus clouds over the UK, a side effect of severe thunderstorms. They hang in the air, clustered like huge, swollen grapes, or (better, given their Latin root) udders. Many of Hayes Greenwood’s skies intentionally resemble mammatus clouds. In High Pressure they gather in a pale mass over the Yorkshire hills, their lobes like the feelers of a nascent creature, seeming to pulse with new possibility. Or, in The Inversion, they rear upwards, their surfaces mottled, like bodies about to be born. In these paintings, clouds come to stand not for the impermanent, indeterminate quasi-abstractions of Damisch’s formulations but as forms coming together, approaching resemblance, like something slowly coming into focus. Grief bends the world. It turns the ordinary into a psychedelic experience by intensifying its strangeness. And it’s like this too, sometimes: the end of something, the beginning of something else. In the end, it’s painting in particular, with its amalgam of the tactile present and the cloudily distant, that brings the ambivalence of loss, and the persistence of love, into view. In Hayes Greenwood’s paintings, these become both impossibly far and close enough to touch and feel.
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Ben Street is an art historian with a particular interest in contemporary painting and its relationship with the art of the past. He lectures at the University of East Anglia and the University of Oxford, as well as many museums, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Wallace Collection. Street is a regular contributor to Art Review, Apollo, Gagosian Quarterly and the Times Literary Supplement. His books for general readers include “How to Enjoy Art” (Yale University Press), “200 Words to Help You Talk About Art” (Lawrence King) and the award-winning children’s book “How to Be an Art Rebel” (Thames & Hudson), which has been translated into five languages.
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