New York artist Jane Kent has made three artists’ books:Privacy, 1999 and Skating, 2011 with texts by Richard Ford and The Orchid Thief Reimagined (2003) with words by Susan Orlean. She also makes silkscreen, drawings and other works that combine printed, drawn, and painted elements.

Susan Tallman, the editor of the journal Art in Print,described SKATING as : “ a defiant assertion of the value of the combination [text and image]… [it] demands two types of attention: the kind that allows us to skate over a text, understanding words without consciously noticing what they look like, and the kind that makes us run our fingers over the surface to understand its molecular character. The mind in motions leans one way and then the other, as if between inner and outer edge of a skate blade. Tilt your hear and a figure eight going nowhere is an infinite relation.” (Jane Kent and Richard Ford Go Skating, Art in Print, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2011)

Kent typically bases her images on a mezzotint ground that she prepares herself; the silhouettes of unfolded cardboard packaging are equally central to her working method. Using these unlikely everyday objects as a starting point she goes on to build compositions of layered and juxtaposed shapes and colors.