GLASSHOUSE REGIONAL GALLERY Laura Jones - Arcadia 7 March - 19 April 2020
Arcadia, 2020, oil on linen diptych, 183 x 198 cm each panel, 183 x 386 cm overall Burnt Banksia series #1 - #8, 2020, oil on linen, 51 x 41 cm Banksias, 2020, oil on linen, 183 x 198 cm Rockpool, 2020, oil on linen, 183 x 198 cm Bananas, 2020, oil on linen, 183 x 198 cm Symbiosis, 2020, oil on linen diptych, 183 x 198 cm each panel, 366 x 198 cm overall Flowering Gum and Burnt Banksias, 2020, oil on linen, 81 x 66 cm Frangipanis, 2020, oil on linen, 66 x 56 cm Artwork photography: Mim Stirling
Gallery Curator: Bridget Purtill Gallery Assistant: Michelle Campano Graphic design: Marie Taylor Catalogue Printing: Chrysalis Printing Essay: Mariam Arcilla Images: Artwork photographer Mim Stirling, Portrait photographer Rachel Kara © 2020 Glasshouse Regional Gallery, the artist, the author
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Cover image: Arcadia, 2020, oil on linen diptych (detail), 183 x 396 cm overall, 183 x 198 cm each panel. This publication is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, study or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without permission. Enquiries should be made to Glasshouse Regional Gallery. Special Thanks to the Glasshouse team for all their efforts and collaborations to make this exhibition successful. A Glasshouse Gallery Initiative. The Glasshouse Regional Gallery is supported by Port MacquarieHastings Council and the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Laura Jones 7 March - 19 April 2020
GLASSHOUSE REGIONAL GALLERY
Printed on recycled paper
Government Sponsors
Founding Sponsors The Glasshouse is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW
It is with great pleasure that the Glasshouse Regional Gallery presents Arcadia, an exhibition by renowned artist Laura Jones. This exhibition continues the Glasshouse Regional Gallery’s commitment to supporting contemporary Australian artists, providing opportunities to develop new work and present quality artistic experiences for our community and visitors to our region. When I look at Laura’s work, I am transported to another place. Each work bursts with colour and life, pushing and pulling the eye to every luscious stroke and detail. Arcadia achieves this and more, zooming in and out of landscapes, Jones brings the outside inside, turning our gallery space into a vibrant celebration of all things natural and wild.
Arcadia combines observations and discoveries from our local area of Port Macquarie and Laura’s family home in the Blue Mountains, collaging her memories and observations with paint. As one of our 2019 Artists in Residence, Laura spent ten days exploring our beautiful coastline, immersing herself within the landscape. Painting and sketching en plein air, she captured the natural jewels that surround us at every turn. This unique experience led to her creating this incredible body of work, highlighting the importance of celebrating nature whilst reminding us of our responsibility to preserve it for future generations. I would like to sincerely thank Laura Jones for creating such an impressive body of work. It was an absolute pleasure to get to know Laura during the residency, and throughout the development of this exhibition. I would also like to thank Mariam Arcilla for her thoughtful portrayal of Laura’s work contained in the following essay. The Glasshouse extends our gratitude to Olsen Gallery and Sophie Gannon Gallery for their support. Bridget Purtill Gallery Curator Glasshouse Regional Gallery
Love and grief And floral wreaths The human heart A coral reef.
Her immersive painting, Arcadia, is a fitting exhibition namesake. Swelling at four-metres wide, the diptych lures you towards a commingled constellation of flowering gums, lotuses, orchids, water lilies, waratahs and Sturt’s Desert peas. Jones foregrounds this blossomy landscape with schools of Ulysses butterflies and a pair of red-bellied parrots. Peer closely and you’ll find, almost camouflaged, an iridescent frog, a rare stick insect, a mountain dragon, and an orange-speckled spider. Many of these creatures are autobiographical. The King parrots, usually found in the wild, began appearing at the home of Jones’ parents in Kurrajong, after being driven outwards during the Australian bushfires. Found resting on her father’s rugged boot was a dragon, covered in forest ash. The frog and stick insect were specimens that caught Jones’ eye at Taronga Zoo, while the butterflies vaulted her back to a childhood on the mountains.
Omar Musa (1) A mohawk of chartreuse-green bananas, nearing ripeness. Troops of flannel flowers in post-bloom malaise. A needlebunched sea urchin bopping around for food or playmates, maybe both. Banksia trees in stages, from the yellow spriteness of their fruiting cones to the grimey remains of branches ravaged by bushfire. The natural world—and its fluttering cycles of life and loss, bloom and decay— has always been omnipresent in Laura Jones’ arts practice. A childhood spent in Kurrajong, at the feet of the glorious Blue Mountains, has imparted the artist with an adulation for environmental wonders. Using an observational approach, Jones creates radiant oil paintings that unravel the profoundness of florals, animalia, fruits and aquatic life. The artist is unheeded by technical exactness, rather, she vivifies the still-life tradition by capturing her subject matters as energies in transit. Her often ponderous and intuitive compositions are replete with enthralling colours, obscure gestures, and forms that flirt with depth and scale. During my visit to her Darlinghurst studio, Jones described her paintings as akin to a ‘Magic Eye’ topography, where textures push and pull, with positive and negative colours coalescing. The effect, she recounted, “is similar to lying on the beach and looking at the world through the holes of your straw hat. The sun comes through, and your vision forms a blurry, collision of images, like a kaleidoscope. I paint with colours and marks in a similar way.” While Jones is increasingly known for her flower paintings —scholared by her nine years as a florist for prominent Sydney flower shops Grandiflora and POHO—her works also feature other living beings, like insects, fruits, corals and amphibians. Her interests deepened when she took on residencies at the Australian Museum’s Lizard Island Research Station, the Heron Island Research Station, and more recently, Port Macquarie. During this time, she worked
with scientists, researchers and local communities to explore the relationship between humans and their ecology in a time of climate change. In 2017, Jones painted underwater scenes from the Great Barrier Reef for her Olsen Gallery exhibition Bleached, documenting pristine corals that were disintegrating due to global warming. As recalled in her diary entries: “the corals get really bright and start to glow—it’s called ‘fluorescing’— and this is the coral’s way of protecting itself, like using sun cream.” She added, “I am overwhelmed by the scientists here because they are optimistic despite all the damage… We [humans] can’t keep hammering our reef. It knows how to regenerate. We’re lucky it can do that, but we need to manage for resilience.” (2) Hope at a time of devastation continues to underline Jones’ works. For Arcadia, her new exhibition at Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Jones seeks solace from the Greek mythos ‘arcadia’, which refers to a paradisiacal garden of untampered tranquility and contentment. These paintings envision an aspirational world where various botanical beings coexist in a self-sustaining wonderland. During the studio process, Jones said “I was thinking about the environment as a symbiotic, biodiverse whole, rather than documenting one place like a postcard of a landscape.” Bananas, 2020, oil on linen, 183 x 198 cm
The exhibition also features the Burnt Banksia series, comprised of specimens collected from her uncle’s property after the fires waned. With their charcoaled branches crowned by gaping, apricot-mouthed pods, these banksias symbolise both the sorrow of unprecedented fires and the plant kingdom’s remarkable tenacity. Their heatsensitive serotiny means banksias will only release seeds if they sense a fire approaching. These winged pits would then be swiped up by hot winds, ensuring they germinate all over the ground to sprout new life. In her studio, Jones handed me a bruised, sooty branch to admire, and said: “burnt banksias look an awful lot like black velvet.” Her musing reminds me of a passage in Michael Petry’s book Nature Morte: “many contemporary artists find a flower in bloom to encapsulates the notion of beauty at its peak”, particularly “the moment before death becomes inevitable and the bruise overtakes the perfect velvet petal.” (3) Perhaps this was why British artist Marc Quinn attempted to give roses, sunflowers and lilies the illusion of foreverness in his Eternal Spring series (1998), by freezing flowers at their prime, using liquid silicon and refrigerators. “They become an image of [the] perfect flower,” Quinn quipped, “Because in reality, their matter is dead and they are suspended in a state of transformation between pure image and pure matter.” (4)
“Laura Jones set the stage for a reinvigoration and a full scale revival of the still life. The intensity of her full throttle, polyamorous colour and the frontality of her compositions put botanical portraiture in a new context.” Anna Johnson Laura Jones (b. Sydney 1982) works across painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. A bold colourist, Jones is known for her exploration of the floral still life genre and for the 2017 exhibition “Bleached” which illustrated the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. Her unique visual language is defined by poetic observations of the natural world. Primarily a painter, her method involves rapid application of thin washes of oil paint, layering broad brushstrokes to build the essence of the subject in brilliant colour. These diaristic investigations tell a story of the personal, scientific and political ideas and meaning behind humanity’s impact on, and relationships with, the environment. Jones stands at the polar opposite though: she paints the fragile and temporal life of organisms as they grow, mature and perish in front of her. In doing so, her works are an enchanting timestamp of our mortality. They also become a love letter to humans and fellow beings—banksias, corals, maple moths, fruit seedlings, and the like—reminding us that we are all evanescent, adaptable and resilient creatures. And that we inherently share this planet as one breathing, aching, curious, hopeful ecosystem. Arcadia is within sight, we just have to be united in its rescue. Mariam Arcilla Footnotes: 1. Instagram: @omarbinmusa, posted 18 March 2019 2. Bleached: Laura Jones, Olsen Gallery, 2017, p:23, 29 3. Petry, M., Nature Morte, United Kingdom: Thames & Hudson, 2013 p:23 4. Romaine, J. Marc Quinn: The Matter of Life and Death, Image Journal: Issue 69 5. Accessed 5 Feb, 2020: https://imagejournal.org/article/marc-quinn-matter-life-death/
Jones has regularly exhibited in public and commercial galleries since 2011. Residencies include travel to two scientific research stations; The Australian Museum’s Lizard Island Research Station and the University of Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station. She has also been Artist in Residence at The Glasshouse Regional Art Gallery, the Byron Bay School of Art, completed extensive private residencies in New York and Japan, and was artist on board the 2018 WWF Expedition to Antarctica. Jones has been a finalist in several art awards, including the Archibald Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Kings School Art Prize, the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. Her work is held in the Artbank collection and private collections in Australia and overseas. Jones holds a Bachelor of Arts (Asian Studies) from the University of Sydney and a Master of Art (Printmaking) from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She is represented by Olsen Gallery in Sydney and Sophie Gannon Gallery in Melbourne.
Burnt Banksias #2, 2020, oil on linen, 51 x 41 cm
Photographer: Rachel Kara