Biography
Jane Bailey Beveridge was born in Edinburgh in 1976 and grew up in Hong Kong. She studied Graphic Design and Fine Art at the University of Brighton, graduated in 1998, and arrived in Dubai in 2002. She joined the art department at Dubai College that same year and has been Head of Art there since 2007. That is twenty-four years of teaching other people to look at things. It has also been twenty-four years of looking herself — at swimming pools and their ordered mosaics, at construction sites, at the dusty haberdasheries on corners that have been there since she arrived, packed from floor to ceiling with thread, fabric, tools and brightly coloured domestic objects. These are among her most cherished places in Dubai. Not the malls. Not the towers. The places that have been overlooked in a city best known for its extravagance. Her practice builds from what she collects: corrugated cardboard, concrete, sand, rust, tangled wires, weathered wood. Mixed-media assemblages that combine painting with mosaic, textiles and found objects. She calls them "five-letter-word adverts" — a reference to her years-long collection of five-letter words whose meaning she finds emotionally precise: TRUST, TRUTH, VOICE, GRACE, ALIVE, TOUCH. DUBAI is five letters. So is LOCAL. The repetitive act of gluing, stitching and knotting is deliberate — meditative, she says, a quiet form of devotion. LOCAL at XVA Gallery in 2026 was her first solo show.