Dear Jane — words and music
Created by Bi-de Way
When Tasmanian artist Jane Giblin encountered the pen and ink drawings of Catherine Penwarne Mitchell — a woman who lived, rode, laughed and drew her way through nineteenth-century Tasmania before dying at just thirty-one — something shifted. A thread pulled taut across a century and a half.
Dear Kate is Jane's response to that discovery: a body of paintings, lithographs and drawings that reaches back through archives, scrapbooks and wooden chests to recover three Mitchell women and return them to the light. It is also, quietly, a story about Jane herself — about how we are shaped by those who came before us, even the ones whose names we never knew.
Dear Jane, written and composed by Bi-de Way, was born from the same impulse. It is a song about the act of looking — across time, across the silence of old paper — and hearing something answer back.
Instrumental…
She found her in an old magazine
A sketch with hands she’d never seen
In parchment lived in black and white
A whisper drawn in the candlelight
She paints with the soul of time long gone
With colours that have played upon
Reviving the touch, the hand long still
She breathes again what time would kill
Her ancestor’s stroke in every line
Echoes through brush, through age, through time
And canvas speaks in silent awe
Of a family she has never known
She paints with the soul of every time long gone
With strokes that feel of old and strong
And in every face she dares to revive
The keepsakes quiet, open-eyed
And she paints with the soul of time long gone
Is it a memory or just a muse
Makes our ghost pick up their hues
She follows them and they show the way
Yesterday’s light on the art of today
And her ancestor’s stroke in every line
Echoes through brush, through age, through time
And canvas speaks in silent awe
Of a family she has never known
She has never known
Dear Jane I hear
I hear your call
Dear Jane