Jane Bedford
JUDGE, THE ART OF HEALERS
For more than four decades, Jane Bedford has followed her creative passion across pottery, beadwork, photography, and painting, building a devoted following within South Africa’s contemporary art scene. A love of travel and adventure has always shaped her eye, and the natural world – trees especially – remains an enduring focus, though she reimagines it in vivid, unconventional ways rather than strict realism.
Her celebrated creative photographs are finished using the Diasec method, layering each image between aluminium and plexiglass for a luminous, dimensional result. Raised in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands on the family farm, a childhood spent alongside her great-aunt, the noted collector Killie Campbell, sparked a lifelong fascination with African culture, artefacts, and craft. That interest led her into beadwork, where she became one of the country’s most collectable bead jewellery designers, working with teams of skilled beaders she describes as a second family. Her Zulu name, Uvemvane, meaning butterfly, reflects the ease with which she moves between mediums in search of colour, texture, and story.
Jane’s painting today plunges into colour and fantasy, and her recent solo exhibition, Abundance, celebrated fullness, layering, and visual generosity. She has long understood creativity as its own form of healing – a belief that makes her especially attuned to the compassion, resilience, and human spirit expressed by healthcare professionals in their submissions to The Art of Healers.
Selected Works
