Jane Burns is an Australian artist, based in Naarm/Melbourne on the unceded Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples. She holds a Bachelor Fine Art Degree - Sculpture (1992) and  Graduate Certificate - Visual Art (2018) from the Victorian College of the Arts, and Diploma of Education - Art (2005) from Monash University. 

 

Burns' practice has ranged across photography, printmaking and installation, but in recent years has focused on digital weaving, creating handwoven works on the TC2 Jacquard loom—a computer-controlled, manually operated handloom. This practice integrates the disciplines of hand weaving and digital weaving, and utilises an innovative technology that only a few artists in Australia currently use.

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As there are just three TC2 looms in Australia - and none are publicly accessible, she has to travel overseas to access her tools. Over the past five years, Burns’ has undertaken residencies and workshops in Finland and New Zealand to gain specialist skills with master weavers and produce work, culminating in exhibitions. 

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Burns is interested in how this technology allows for the traditions of hand woven tapestry with the flexibility to use digital imagery and produce objects that sit between the pictorialism of painting and photography, and the materiality of weaving. Through the laborious process of hand weaving, she constructs detailed surfaces of pattern, structure, and pixel-level imagery, building each work thread by thread, often to large scale.

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Recent work, Movement (Arrest) was made in Finland in 2024 on the largest TC2 loom available. These works explore the tension between individuals and authority at the moment of arrest. Reimagining news imagery of environmental protests, the series examines the clash between urgent social movements and political resistance and the title refers both to the act of arrest and to broader efforts to suppress emerging citizen movements. Movement (Arrest) was shown in 2025 as a solo exhibition at The Lennox. 

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In 2024, Burns’ completed a residency at UNSW Art & Design, where she developed studies for Stubborn Tangles, a new handwoven series exploring the body in protest as an act of locking on through collective action, resistance, and love, entangled in our interdependence and interconnectedness as a species. In preparation for weaving the final works, the artist produced a series of photos through staging a role play protest to show the body locking arms and legs, forming human chains, sit-ins—to highlight the body as a tool of resistance, and to capture a possible effervescence - a state of intense shared emotional activation and sense of unison that emerges during instances of collective behavior. Translated into woven form on the TC2 Jacquard hand loom, the photographic takes on the pictorialism of painting and the structural aesthetic of the warp and weft matrix. Stubborn Tangles final works are currently being made during a residency in Aubusson, France.

 

In another body of textile work, By a Thread, the artist deconstructed cloth she had printed, to leave only the warp thread remaining, the ghostly traces representing critically endangered animals and species loss. By a Thread was featured in Art + Climate = Change 2019, Art + Climate Change II (2022), and exhibited at MARS Gallery.

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Alongside her art practice, Jane works as an environmental consultant, advising on environmental action and behaviour change. In 2015, she was awarded Victorian Environmental & Sustainability Educator of the Year. 

 

She maintains a studio at Creative Spaces, The Meat Market.