RIP to my partner in art – Janice Wilkins MFA

I write this with a heavy heart. There is just no describing the bond you have with someone when you create stuff with them. Since Janice passed away last week, I have thought a lot about our special friendship and the weird, smart, and silly things we made together over the past 14 years. Here are just some of the highlights:

• we dressed in hi-vis and put Scotland Yard and News International under Overt Surveillance;
• we were Co-Directors of an arts organisation we called the “CIA”
• we spent a week in an allotment writing a womanifesto and creating an upper and lower house in a caravan and a shed;
• we created a trail of bicycle sculptures across Cambridge for the Tour de France;
• we were “artists in residence” at the Humanitarian Centre (and won the Cambridge University life raft debate)
• we invented the “quick-sketch-tour” for tourists and made shit up for a laugh;
• we co-wrote a catalogue for an exhibition that didn’t happen at the Serpentine Gallery;
• we painted some good (and not so good) portraits of WWI heroes
• and we graduated together from a Masters in Fine Art, but then agreed that artists shouldn’t have exhibitions (I broke that rule today – but I promise it will be my last).

As well as all that, we spent time with millionaires and feminists; we experienced Victor’s circus in Spain; I cooked her copious smashed up fried eggs; she helped me stage a crime scene in a model village; and we laughed. Mostly we laughed a lot.

Janice made her own brilliant art of course. She was modest about it, and often had more ideas than energy to pursue them. She painted, but was really most comfortable making three dimension art – she sewed, she built, she made films. She was inspired by feminism, but more so the every-day woman: Janice loved women at bus stops, with shopping trolleys, and in supermarkets. Her muses were “Doris” and Cat Woman (the original one), and she loved old black and white films.

This is my favourite piece by Janice Wilkins. I am pleased to have taken this photograph for our final “Masters” show at Anglia Ruskin University. I am pleased too that my family has a lot of her creations dotted around the place. She made things well, researched A LOT (mostly by reading Vogue magazines), and got told off by our lecturers for having too much “humour” instead of “wit” in her work. I can hear her now saying: “bollocks to that”.

One of Janice’s pieces was called “Bag for Life” and we often referred to each other as “old bags”. I’m heartbroken that I won’t have Janice around anymore to laugh and make things with, but in so many ways, she will be with me for ever – in what we made together. RIP my friend.