Heather Jansch

Who is Heather Jansch?

Heather Jansch is a British sculptor notable for making life-sized sculptures of horses from driftwood. She has also used cork as a material in her creations. Jansch reported that she struggled in her youth in schools, but had a passion for drawing and horses.

While an art student at Walthamstow in 1967 she met the musician Roy Harper. It was Harper who introduced her to the guitarist Bert Jansch, who she later married.

She bought a smaller hill farm, breeding Welsh cobs and specializing in painting traditional equestrian portraits until starting to sculpt. She later moved to south Devon.

By 1986 she was exhibiting sculpture regularly with Courcoux and Courcoux, a leading provincial contemporary gallery then based in Salisbury who took her work to the London Contemporary Art Fair where it received very favourable reviews.

Her life-size driftwood horses became her hall mark and in 1999 were featured in the Shape of the Century 100 years of Sculpture in Britain at Salisbury Cathedral.

The exhibition was then taken to London’s Canary Wharf as part of the millennium celebrations in 2000 where her horses caught the attention of Tim Smit KBE founder of the Eden Project and she was invited to become one of their resident artists. Her horse was voted the most popular art work there and has since become widely known as The Eden Horse.