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Jan Nimmo's fine art career began in 1986 - since then she has exhibited on a regular basis, both in solo exhibitions and group shows. She has travelled extensively throughout Spain and Latin America, which has had an impact on how she works and how she views the world.

Over the years, Jan's work has explored various diverse areas of personal interest, and she now seeks to create work which can raise awareness of specific issues and build bridges between fields of traditional art and campaigning. Her work has become political in that it seeks to highlight issues such as trade injustice and labour rights, and to emphasise the importance of popular traditions and movements.

Jan works in a variety of different media including drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, video, sound recording, documentary, writing and storytelling. Her work aspires to being both accessible and challenging.

Oro Verde / Green Gold

Jan has embarked on a long term collaborative project entitled Oro Verde / Green Gold, which focuses on Latin American banana plantation workers and banana workers' trade unionists. She has travelled to Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador and will return to Costa Rica in autumn 2005. The project is a body of work which includes multiple prints, film documenting violence used against workers, working and living conditions and the environmental and social impact of agrochemicals. Jan is currently working on transcriptions and translations of testimonies and video installations which form part of this project. For more details, images and worker's testimonies go to the Green_Gold web site.

 

Buscando América / In Search of America

In her 2002 exhibition, Buscando América (In Search of America), Jan sought to bring together different areas of research carried out in Mexico, Cuba and Costa Rica and to challenge the Scottish perception of "America" and to build a bridge between popular culture in Latin America and Scotland.

The work was exhibited at both the Fringe Gallery, Castlemilk, Glasgow and Out of the Blue in Edinburgh.

The Cuban part of the exhibition featured work based on traditional music; portraits of veteran singers and musicians both in woodcuts and photographs. There were also field recordings made in Cuba. This part of the exhibition took on the form of Casa de la Trova form (Cuba's Houses of Music).

The Mexican part of the exhibition took the form of woodcut portraits of popular artists from Mexico, from Mexico City, Metepec, Olinalá, Sierra Norte de Puebla and the Coast of Guerrero. It also included video footage fimed by Jan at the San Isidro Labrador celebrations - the Paseo de los Locos procession - in Metepec.

A part of the exhibition was dedicated to Latin American trade unionists who have been murdered. This took the form of an offering, traditional in Mexico on the the Days of the Dead (1-2 November), but on this occasion dedicated to Cesar Herrera, the recently murdered leader of a banana workers' union in Colombia. There were also text based peices - messages from some of his colleagues in Costa Rica.

An event took place in the Castlemilk gallery, to coincide with the exhibition's time in Glasgow, which looked at trade, commodities and trade unionism, with contributions from Glasgow based poet, Gerry Loose, and from Mike Gonzalez from the Latin American Studies Department, University of Glasgow.

Memorias Grabadas / Recorded Memories

This exhibition of woodcut portraits recorded many of the people whom Jan had met during journeys through various Latin American countries, and included a number of new works portraying banana plantation workers and trade unionists from Costa Rica and Ecuador. The exhibition was on display at Artlink's gallery at St John's Hospital in Lvingston and then at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, between winter 2003 and the summer of 2004.