Jane Strode is an artist living and working on a farm in Umhlali on the north coast of KZN. She runs a Saturday morning craft market in the town and is also involved in the family's indigenous nursery, situated on the farm. Prior to this she worked for 11 years as a journalist with the Daily News in Durban. This is her second solo exhibition.

Strode is visually disabled, the result of a hereditary eye disease. Recently she was also diagnosed with a related eye dystrophy. Regardless of this she has continued to work, exploring her interest in light and abstraction. Her interest and artistic endeavour is summed up by a statement by Patrick Heron, who once said that "the best abstraction breathes reality, it is redolent of forms in space, of sunlight and air".

Strode states that “Although my paintings are not pure abstractions, I am impulsively, obsessively drawn to the effect of light in nature. I use my camera, an old Nikon, to help me, sometimes manipulating the images on my computer before I finally begin painting. I am drawn by the texture of nature – the roughness of bark, the silkiness of a petal, the crisp fragile-ness of a dried leaf.”

The exhibition consists of paintings installed in a chronological order, a series of works that charts her artist’s practice of recent years.

Dream-Works runs in the NSA’s Mezzanine and Park Galleries until February 13. More information from the NSA’s curator Storm Janse van Rensburg on 031 202 3686 or e-mail: curator@nsagallery.co.za www.nsagallery.co.za