Jane and the Shape of Making | 2026 Creative Spirit of the North Awardee

Jane’s relationship to Ely began long before she lived here full time. Before adulthood, before art school, before language for practice or process. It began in summers, filtered through family memory and the kind of repetition that quietly shapes a person.

Her grandmother’s family settled here after emigrating from Finland, out on land where a cabin still stands. Jane grew up returning to that place each summer. Sunny, breezy afternoons. Misty mornings near the water. Long evenings of cards and laughter at the cabin table. For Jane and her siblings, Ely felt constant. The cabin stayed the same. The smell stayed the same. Even the way time passed felt preserved.

“There was a comfort in that predictability,” she says, especially when “back home we had a pretty eventful life as a family of eight.”

That sense of steadiness stayed with her. After graduating from college, when life felt uncertain, Jane returned to Ely not to escape but to orient herself. “Ely always felt like a safe space where there was time to process and reflect,” she explains.

Today, her life here looks different. Fuller. More interconnected. One day she emails about painting windows for a local organization. That evening she is building sets for the high school play. “There are so many artistic opportunities here that I never knew I would have,” she says, “working in mediums I never even considered.” In that way, Ely continues to mirror the hopeful wonder she associated with it as a child, just through a more complex lens.

Jane lives at the intersection of caregiving, community work, and artmaking. These roles inform one another constantly, though not without friction. She is candid about failure, about regrouping, about trying again. Artmaking taught her how to trust process over perfection. Recently, she has been applying that same mindset elsewhere.

“I’m learning that, no matter the role, growth happens through process rather than perfection.”

Her days are layered. Artmaking between daycare drop-off and work. Another art gig in the evening after Avery is asleep. The emotional and physical labor of one role often pulls from another. When imbalance shows up, Jane notices it. She steps back. She rests. Balance, she says, is not a fixed achievement but an ongoing recalibration.

Despite living in the Northwoods, nature is not the primary driver of Jane’s creative vision. That distinction matters here. Her work is shaped instead by relationships, bodies, and how people move through and affect their spaces. “I am driven by the way we build interpersonal relationships and how that affects our deeper selves,” she explains.

When those relationships strain, her work changes. “Moments where my relationship with others and myself is struggling,” she notes, “my art has turned void of the comforting iconography I used to build these home spaces we know so well.”

At times, this focus can feel out of step in a place so often defined by landscape. Jane acknowledges that tension without resistance. People should be inspired by nature here. At the same time, she has found Ely to be deeply encouraging. Artists support one another even when their inspirations diverge.

Much of Jane’s practice has developed without a traditional, fully stocked studio. She remembers a professor warning that school might be the last time she would have access to that kind of infrastructure. Later, she understood exactly what he meant.

Jane became an artistic scavenger. Hardware stores. Secondhand tools. Slow accumulation. Many of the tools she bought after moving here in 2019 are still what she uses today. Her jewelry torch is simple. Her printing press is heavy and temperamental. Years of running a college print shop taught her how to work with its quirks. Theater work sharpened that instinct even further.

“I love figuring out how to build things from limited materials,” she says, “especially when it means turning a pile of junk into something beautiful.”

Limitation, for Jane, is not optional. “The biggest mistake I can make as an artist is not creating because I lack the ‘right’ tools, space, or money,” she says. Time is her current constraint. She is working toward restructuring that. The unrefined nature of this approach shows up in her work through simplicity and texture. No two prints are identical. Variation is not a flaw. It is a feature.

Jane’s workshops emphasize mistakes, trial, and shared guidance. Imperfection is essential not only to learning, but to belonging. Knowing when to let a piece rest, when to step away, comes from experience. From seeing what happens when you do not.

“How boring life and art making would be if you always knew what you were going to get,” she says. “If things turned out exactly how you pictured.”

In a rural community, this philosophy extends beyond the studio. Connection is not optional. Resources are limited. Artists become multidisciplinary. Skills are shared freely. “Mistakes, improvisation, and shared guidance,” Jane explains, “is what makes life truly vibrant here.”

Jane works across printmaking, silversmithing, and puppetry. The throughline is not medium, but mindset. Printmaking entered her life through a practical decision. Jewelry followed out of financial necessity. Puppetry arrived through theater and trust, when she was asked to create her first puppets for NLAA’s Little Shop of Horrors despite never having worked in sculpture before.

What keeps pulling her across disciplines is the same instinct. Figure it out. “I tend to be stubborn in the face of failure,” she says. Over time, that stubbornness has evolved into confidence. “If I try my best, I can usually figure it out.”

Jane’s work often engages with trauma, joy, and the body through abstract forms. She hopes viewers see themselves in the pieces once they leave her hands. “Everyone is trying to feel less alone in their experiences,” she says, “so I want even my simplest pieces to create islands of safety and quiet joy.”

Motherhood reshaped how Jane thinks about time, creativity, and selfhood. In the beginning, everything went toward being a mother. It was necessary. Over time, art returned in fragments. New opportunities. Old instincts. The pause allowed her to reassess what she wanted to continue artistically.

“The reward for saying no was time with my family,” she reflects, “which became kind of a win win.”

As the 2026 Creative Spirit of the North Awardee, Jane is being offered something increasingly rare. Space without pressure to monetize. For her, artistic freedom right now looks like permission. “Permission to make work without worrying about whether it’s good, likable, or sellable.” She wants to experiment. To make “bad” work. To trust that something meaningful will emerge. A show at the end of the year offers structure, not pressure.

As Jane steps into this next chapter, rooted in Ely and reaching outward, she hopes the year reveals integration. How motherhood reshapes her art. How confidence earned quietly can be

acknowledged without apology. Art has always helped her process major transitions. This one is no different.

Jane is becoming something steady. Someone who trusts process. Who understands when to push and when to rest. Who knows that freedom is not the absence of constraint, but the ability to work honestly within it.