Statement

Judes Crow’s art reveals a preoccupation with loss experienced through the death of three brothers, family estrangements and adoption. Using strong emotion and narrative, her work includes figurative painting and ceramic pieces. Her intense work expresses Crow’s challenge to a society that would hide death, dying, suffering and distress.

In ‘Washed Ashore, Identity Unknown’, a ceramic piece of thirty stoneware plaques, reference is made to her family’s involvement with the coastguard service and connects her personal stories to those of bodies washed ashore from shipwrecks off the island where she lives.

Sixty ceramic heads cast from the mould of a doll’s head found washed ashore are a comment on the loss at sea of sixty un-named children. These heads are worn and battered appearing as relics of another time, with a transformed beauty because of their disfigurement.

Crow's 'post-historic' gravegoods made in the style of pre-historic archaelogical finds reveal memories, people and objects she would take with her to the afterlife.