Jan Kerr

Artist & Poet

Still image from Urchin Hearts, Brittle Stars
Film/Poem/Installation
New York City, July 2024

© Jan Kerr. All rights reserved.

Time & chance no. 5
New York City 2024

Film/Poem/InstallationUrchin Hearts, Brittle Stars
Filmpoem/PerformanceLore
A tale of love, landscape & the gendered construct of self.
Catalogue PamphletThen Here Now (Still)
Site-specific installation poem exploring the geological bedrock underpinning Manhattan's skyline.Installed at Courtesy of Dietl
Dietl International
207 W 25th St. New York NY 10001

• Bio & Selected Projects

About

Jan Kerr was born in Ayr, Scotland in 1959. She studied sculpture at Gray’s School of Art followed by the MA in Mixed Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 2021 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Met. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Edwin Morgan Second Life Award and her poem Compass will be published in Magma 96: Antartica in November 2026.She held her first solo exhibition, Time & Chance No. 5, at Courtesy of Dietl in New York in 2024. The installation of poetry, performance and film explored themes of love, landscape, gendered identity and the geology of deep time. It also marked a return to filmmaking with the filmpoem Urchin Hearts, Brittle Stars.The large-scale installation of Mark Storor's The Suicide Chronicles at Close to Home in the Cunard Building, Liverpool (5th Sept-10th Oct 2026), will include her documentation of the final workshop for Suicide Chronicle One.Jan has lived in North Wales since 2000 where she raised a family, established Jan Miller Photography and volunteered extensively as an educator for marginalised young people throughout the region. She has freelanced as an artist and facilitator on projects including Lead Artist on Mostyn Digital Project for TATE’s Circuit and Creative Team member for National Theatre Wales on Storor's production of Lifted By Beauty : Adventures in Dreaming. Her favourite role was as a posie-maker to the Army of Beauty for Heart of Glass in 2017.Selected exhibitions include: Signs of the Times MoMA Oxford, the London Film Festival, the South London Gallery, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Cambridge Darkroom and Art in General, New York. The soundwork, I Am a Regional Variation; I Am My Mother’s Tongue, is held in the permanent collection of the Women’s Sound Archive.

Reading from Lore at Courtesy of Dietl, New York July 2024