Ann-Marie James's Chieftain series is made in response to the Wiltshire Museum's Bush Barrow Lozenge, arguably the finest example of Bronze Age gold craftsmanship ever recorded. James began her complex working process for this body of large paintings by creating a silkscreen of the Bush Barrow Lozenge, with attention to its precise, geometric lines. Here, James thinks of the silkscreen as a brushstroke, used to build the composition of the painting along with layers of drawing, paint and medium. In the resulting works, exacting lines intersect with splashes of ink and gestural painterly marks, with a final layer of drawing in 24 ct gold.

Ann-Marie James's Archer series is inspired by the late Neolithic flint arrowheads discovered in the grave of the ‘Amesbury Archer’ from the Salisbury Museum collection. From line drawings of two arrowheads, James produced rubber stamps in a variety of sizes which served as the starting point for her abstraction. These paintings incorporate swirling layers of white and gold acrylic, which James finally worked into with 24 ct gold leaf. The use of gold reflects the assumed status of the 'Amesbury Archer', who due to his elaborate grave is thought to have been a metalworker of high social standing. 

Ann-Marie James is interested in the way in which found images of works from antiquity and art history might be used to investigate her own responses to individual works, their themes and origins. Through repetition, obfuscation, abstraction and the exploration of material process, source imagery is re-contextualised and transformed to produce new hybrids. Her paintings in acrylic are built up through layer upon layer of materials and techniques, as well as references to the history of the discipline.