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Jane Danko

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I was born in a small town in East Texas, on the Banks of the Sabine River, next to the swamp that unites Texas and Louisiana.   There I grew up, collecting insects and snakes in mason jars, drawing the gorgeous landscape of the swamp, making sculptures from Cypress knees, and assembling little boxes from buttons, bits of lace, and things I found in the swamp or in the riverbed.  In my childhood, I was fascinated by the metaphors and allegories of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and always asked about meanings far beyond their literal context.  Curiosity about hidden meanings continued through my adolescence and early adulthood, and the nuns and priests of my Catholic education were dismayed, despairing of my delving questions about the Old and New Testaments, the Catechism, about Catholic iconography and mythology, and about our faith.

In my work, I have continued to explore the meanings of these things, and in my travels I have sought to find meaning in the iconography and symbolism of diverse cultures, the Mapuche Indians of the high Andes, the American desert tribes, the ancient Celtic and Castro cultures of northern Europe, and throughout the world where I have walked, as well as in published and obscure writings.   

In 2005 I was fortunate to be selected as a participant in a two-week residency with Agustín Ibarrola at the Contemporary Arts Museum in La Coruña, Spain, where I and my work underwent a startling, scary, and explosive epiphany.  With the help of Agustín, and in spite of my many tearful cries of despair and sleepless nights, I learned to turn my fascination and curiosity about essential meaning inward, to explore parts of my inner self still unknown to me.  The result is my current work, in which I try to depict that which is timeless and universal, that which clearly exists in my deep consciousness and in the primeval collective consciousness of us all, that which although not so easily articulated, is instantly recognizable as a beautiful, and sometimes disturbing, essential part of our being.