Janice McNab is a Scottish artist and academic who now lives in the Netherlands. She was born in Aberfeldy, studied at Glasgow School of Art, and in 2000, moved to Amsterdam on a Scottish Arts Council residency programme. Her PhD is from the University of Amsterdam, and she is Head of the MA Artistic Research at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. From 2020-2022 she is also a post-doctoral scholar with The University of the Arts, The Hague / Leiden University.

Over the last twenty years, McNab’s serial painting projects have sought to represent women’s lives at their immediate point of contact with the world. The Isolation Paintings, an early documentary project, recorded the lifestyles of women whose previous houses or workplaces had become toxic environments, which forced them into new lives. It emphasised our porosity as bodies, and The Chairs and The Chocolate Box Paintings went on to explore the veneered landscapes of consumption we are sold to placate this vulnerability.

In 2010, The Ice Cream Paintings began a more reparative approach to body definition and restriction, and this continues with the current project: The Ghost Artist. This combines art historical work on other women artists with paintings that explore how the inner, sensing side of our skins might be portrayed through the things we touch, see, and eat every day. Paintings of the sensed world that lies just beyond words and just beneath the inside of all our skins.