Originally from Drumnadrochit, it is the latter location which has provided inspiration for her new project.

Now back in Scotland, she has brought with her the fruits of her work in Palestine, a challenging work which looks at the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

"Return of the Soul: The Nakbah Project", which is making its western Europe debut during the Edinburgh Arts Festival, uses thousands of wax figures to bring home the suffering of innocent victims of the 1948 war which secured the survival of the new state of Israel, but also resulted in over 700,000 Palestinians — around 80 per cent of the Arab population — fleeing their ancestral homelands.

Jane, along with a new generation of Israeli historians, believes this was a deliberate and brutal act of ethnic cleansing.

Described as an artist without borders, since studying at Central St. Martins College and the Slade School of Art in London, Jane has worked as a theatre designer and creative producer with companies in Greece, Poland and Lithuania.

It was one of her Polish visits, where she made a return trip to the former concentration camp at Majdenek near Lublin, which inadvertently set Jane on the road to Palestine.

Her last visit coincided with the arrival of a group of Israeli pilgrims. Though Jane felt great sympathy towards the pilgrims after they left — she found they had left some Israeli flags outside the camp.

"I started to think about the repercussions of the creation of that flag. The Israeli flag fills me with fear because it is associated with so many war crimes and here it was outside a place where so many appalling atrocities had been committed," she explained.

"You can't inflict human suffering on others because of the suffering you have gone through. I wanted to come to some sort of understanding of that."

This led her to look more closely at what happened in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, a period which Palestinians call Al Nakbah, Arabic for "The Catastrophe".

"It was a very troubled, unjust history and I realised how little I and most people knew about what really took place," Jane said.

"I decided I wanted to do a very big project on it and it had to be a monumental project, otherwise it would be quite ridiculous for a Scottish artist to work away in a London flat. I released then that I had to move to the area."

To reflect the individual suffering created by this conflict, Jane hit on the idea of creating a series of wax figures, each of them unique.

"They had to be given a soul, a life, and I realised that could only happen if they were made by Palestinians," Jane explained.

To achieve this, she needed the help of an organisation within Palestine and to her delight, the first gallery she approached with the idea, the Al Hoash Gallery in East Jerusalem, was enthusiastic and offered her a post as an artist in residence.

Thanks to Al Hoash, UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, and local arts organisations AL-JANA (The Arab Resource Centre for Popular Arts) and Shams Theatre in Beirut she was able to work with refugees inside and outside camps in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon, where she heard first hand accounts from 1948. The project has now gathered around 1000 testimonies from Palestinians, some of which have been recorded for the exhibition.

"It was important that as far as possible very figure had an identity and was made in the image of a real person, either dead or alive, who fled from their homeland in 1948," Jane added.

It was in the refugee camps of Lebanon, El-Buss in the south and Beddawi in the north, that Jane heard the most harrowing witness statements, with experience of more recent conflicts adding to the stories she heard from the 1948 conflict.

Beddawi had recently doubled in size after refugees fled from a neighbouring camp to escape fighting between the Lebanese army and a new Islamist group, Fatah al Islam.

"I was interviewing people from 1948 who were on the move from one war and one devastated camp to another," Jane added.

Jane Frere with thousands of wax figures, depicting the suffering of victims of the Arab-Israeli war.

Meeting the Palestinian people, Jane was impressed with the way the people had retained their dignity and humour, even after decades of exile and conflict.

"They are very philosophical. They are also very polite and respectful," Jane said.

"They took me into their homes as one of their own and I always felt totally safe.

"They are also incredibly generous. They would rather their children had nothing to eat as long as you did."

Many of the stories she heard were absolutely appalling, featuring as they did the deliberate targeting of civilians in order to drive them from the area.

"When I heard things like that, I would feel this weight on my shoulders and find myself asking: why are we not doing anything about this?" Jane said.

Contrasting with the openness of the Palestinian people, the only place where Jane regularly experienced hostility was at the Israeli military checkpoints.

"Every day I observed young Israeli Defence Force women and men and their attitude to the Palestinians was quite abusive. It was almost as if they would go out of their way to humiliate people," Jane said.

"The occupation is very cruel and I lived it, so I became very angry," she stated.

"Return of the Soul" received its world preview in Jerusalem and Jane revealed she had no idea of what the response would be.

"It was an extraordinary experience," she said.

"Most of the people who came to the exhibition were Palestinians, so for them if was cathartic. It was about them, their history and it was very personal. Many were crying."

Jane's challenge is now to elicit a similar powerful response from non-Palestians, including, she hopes, within Israel itself.

The Edinburgh display will feature 3000 wax figures, but others are still being manufactured in Palestine and future displays will see around 6000 figures on display.

"This doesn't have a message as such — I think that's a terribly grandiose claim for any artwork," Jane added.

"Instead it has an aim. I want people to ask the questions that I asked and the most fundamental question is: what happened to the Palestinian people? It's not political, it's humanitarian. I'm not a politician or an academic. I'm not in a position to make grand sweeping statements, I just want to pass on other people's stories."

* "Return of The Soul" can be seen at WASPS Studios, 1D Patriothalll, Stockbridge, Edinburgh, until Monday 18th August.

Jane will also be appearing at the Edinburgh International book festival at 3.30pm on Saturday 9th August with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who has caused controversy in his homeland with his critical look at the birth of Israel, and Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh.

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

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