Jez Franck - Artist

Jez Franck - Artist Multidisciplinary artist, mythmaker and community weaver. Welcome wild seekers, wanderers and those still becoming.

Creating participatory art, installations and gatherings using found materials, symbols, language and story. Jani / Jez is a multidisciplinary artist and facilitator living in Southampton, England. Their work is informed by ecological activism, magic and ritual, their identity as a nonbinary person and their experiences as an immigrant and outlier. They are interested in exploring the liminal spac

es between objects, people, ideas and experiences. Their practice links between small, everyday personal experience, life stories and the global events unfolding around us. Through mixed media art, poetry, writing and installation they explore the way symbols act on us as artists and as audience, prodding us emotionally and forming our ideas about ourselves and the world. Jani is interested in placing the digital and the natural world in concert with and opposition to each other to see the way they interact and change one another. Breaking out of binary ideas and allowing fluidity, uncertainty and change in these times by inviting the viewer to feel unsure and to access their intuitive responses to archetypes and symbols. Recent artwork, teaching, community projects & festival site art:-

- ‘The Oracle of Gender Designation’ travelling immersive installation
- ‘Life Cycles’ installation at The Art House
– ‘Letters from Limbo’ lockdown series.
– ‘So Visible’ installation for ArtSoTrans, 2019
– Participatory art events for The Big Draw in collaboration with Southampton City Art Gallery since 2006 (annual event)
– Site art at The Big Green Gathering, Southern Lights Circus & Arts Festival, Waveform Festival, Ropewalk Community Garden and smaller private events.

Summer Solstice Blessings! I've been thinking about how strange it is that we so often treat seasonal festivals as a sin...
21/06/2026

Summer Solstice Blessings!

I've been thinking about how strange it is that we so often treat seasonal festivals as a single day. As though the Sun arrives on a particular date and declares: "Today is midsummer."

Yesterday and tomorrow are almost the same length as today. The Moon is much the same. We talk about full moons and new moons as moments, but they are really processes, brightening and fading over days.

I'm wondering if these turning points are better understood as thresholds than dates. Not points on a calendar, but stretches of time we can walk into and back out of. A Solstice Tide rather than a Solstice Day. A season of noticing. A pause in the turning of the wheel.

Perhaps spiral time is less concerned with exact moments and more interested in lingering. In paying attention to the elderflower, the swifts overhead, the warmth that remains after sunset. Not arriving at midsummer, but inhabiting it for a while.

Now that they have opened the gift I can reveal another sigil made for friends for their wedding day. 26 of the original...
15/06/2026

Now that they have opened the gift I can reveal another sigil made for friends for their wedding day. 26 of the original JourneySpiral symbols correlate with letters of our alphabet, enabling me to make these sigils using initials as a starting point.

Pennant - this symbol is set on high places, claiming power through visibility, not ownership. By freely embracing identity we step into it joyfully and playfully.

Earth - grounding, origins, roots. Rootedness is not inherited, it is claimed. Roots are alive, not fixed. This symbol looks inward and stands still long enough to find belonging.

17 years ago today I was at Kimmeridge making these. Land art my practice for many years, often undocumented - I am glad...
15/06/2026

17 years ago today I was at Kimmeridge making these. Land art my practice for many years, often undocumented - I am glad I did photograph some! Tidal pools and intertidal rocks are one of my favourite places to create - right in the space that is neither land nor sea, but is also both. There is power in those liminal regions.

For Nicola Anne Beck's birthday, I painted her a small sigil made from two JourneySpiral symbols: **Crown** and **Forge*...
11/06/2026

For Nicola Anne Beck's birthday, I painted her a small sigil made from two JourneySpiral symbols: **Crown** and **Forge**.

Together they happen to echo our initials in the correlating alphabet of symbols, but the piece means much more than that.

The pigments and inks come from places we've walked together. Some of the materials were gathered with her help. Riverbanks, paths, pockets full of found things. Fragments of landscape carried home and transformed. Oak gall ink, from Nicola's favourite lands, privet berry from the front garden, bracken from our favourite dog walk, sloes collected by the boatyard where is berthed.

So this isn't just ink and watercolour on paper.

It's shared journeys, conversations, rainy walks, adventures, our story.

The places that have shaped us.
A little map of a life woven together.

Happy birthday, my love. ❤️

Itchen River spiral and painting with the Itchen & oak gall ink - natural pigments are a journey of collaboration and su...
05/06/2026

Itchen River spiral and painting with the Itchen & oak gall ink - natural pigments are a journey of collaboration and surprise.

Some weeks feel heavier than others.This week has held worry, grief, too much time staring at screens, and not enough ti...
04/06/2026

Some weeks feel heavier than others.

This week has held worry, grief, too much time staring at screens, and not enough time beside water. So I found myself thinking about the River Itchen and what it means to belong to a place when things aren't easy, and I took myself there in the rain this afternoon with a pot of oak gall ink and a sad heart.

The river couldn't offer reassurance. It couldn't tell me everything would be alright.

But it was still there. Flowing. Carrying both beauty and loss.

This week's JourneySpiral reflection on Substack is about belonging, grief, hope, and the quiet lessons rivers offer when certainty is nowhere to be found.

Please follow the link to read the whole thing, if you would like to - it is in the usual place (look down)

Layering oak gall ink, foraged chalk, found charcoal and earth pigment in the studio today - letting the materials dance...
03/06/2026

Layering oak gall ink, foraged chalk, found charcoal and earth pigment in the studio today - letting the materials dance and form relationship with each other. Every mark is a story - of last summer, of a seabed from millions of years ago, of a layer of sediment hidden in the dark for ages, of a fire I sat around with friends.

Plant ink spirals as ATCs - some have already travelled!
01/06/2026

Plant ink spirals as ATCs - some have already travelled!

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Arches Studios
Southampton

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