[8] In her work International Behaviour (2000) she imposed a photograph of Vietnam refuges in boats on a background of vivid, psychedelic colours and patterns.
[12] Jan Nelson's works exploit emotional, textural and chromatic intensity, oscillating between fear and power, complacency and dissent.
Nelson's multi-disciplinary practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and installation, concentrates on the role of the visual in the construction and experience of the developing self.
[13] Nelson's suggested narratives frequently involve pivotal moments, transformations and the in-between spaces in which the potential for change and transcendence operate.
[14] For instance, in the 1990s her paintings (Anticipating Transcendence,1996 and An Ordinary Life, 1997) explored iconic tropes of modernism by refiguring the work of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni.
Collectively titled Walking in Tall Grass, her works take as their subject a young person – male or female – on the cusp of adolescence.
Highly individual, with distinctive features, clothing and other pieces of visual information (a pom-pom hat, badges, a particular anorak), they are one step removed from their viewer in that they are discretely turned away and do not meet the eye directly.
This subsequent step then becomes an exercise in going beyond the truth of the photograph, introducing a hyper-reality and powerful intensity of colour and emotion so that, in Nelson's words, the painting "begins to vibrate".
[Further intensifying the scene Nelson often exhibits these works on] hand-painted striped gallery walls which introduces an abstract, chromatic intensity and contrast to the figuration of the canvases.
Riffing on her earlier 'bleached' cast 3D works, ... Nelson's installation continued to vibrate with the energy of 'the real' and to oscillate between the often-conflicting states of vulnerability and defiance.
This irreverent gesture later reconstructed by the street artist Sirum 1's Venom tag which was applied to Nelson's Defiance as a reiteration of the act of reclamation.