Enclosed Garden. Vanessa Jones outlines the evolution of her paint ing practice to date.

Vanessa Jones, Bowmen (self-portrait), 2021, oil on linen, 185 x 140 cm; image courtesy of the artist. Vanessa Jones, Cabbage Baby (self-portrait), 2021, oil on linen, 80 x 60 cm; image courtesy of the artist.

I AM A figurative artist painting in oils on canvas. At 40 years old, and with a six-year-old in tow, I just completed my MFA in painting at NCAD. As a graduate, I was shortlisted for the 2021 RDS Visual Art Awards and was thrilled to receive the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award, as well as the RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award.

My decision to return to art college was pivotal. I had graduated from the George Washington University in Washington, DC, in 2003 with a BA in Fine Arts and Art History and had every intention of going onto graduate school for painting, but year after year I thought: “It can wait.” Despite not taking a direct path to a consistent arts practice, I can’t regret any of my decisions that got me to this point. After graduating from college, I worked at the Frick Collection in New York and, later, at IMMA in Dublin. In these arts administrative roles, I encountered a wide range of art world experiences, from just being able to work near a Duccio or an Ingres, to liaising on press materials with Brian O’Doherty.

But when I gave birth to my daughter in 2015, all of my priorities shifted. It seemed that motherhood pushed my practice forward, front and centre, so I enrolled at NCAD and was fortunate enough to receive funding from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation in Canada. I’m not sure how successful I’d have been without their support. The financial relief freed up time and headspace to make work.

I was into the first year of my MFA when lockdown hit. At the time, I was skirting around Jungian ideas of the feminine and fairy tales, but I was still painting small domestic mother and child self-portraits. The paintings were very intimate and almost iconlike, but in lockdown, their domesticity felt too familiar and almost didactic. Without any sense of time or schedule, I tried to make lockdown a period for reflection, research and reevaluation. The pandemic led to obvious associations with medieval plague. In turn, this helped focus my research on the medieval walled garden – a symbol of isolation and protection that suited the collective moment. The whole idea of the hortus conclusus was all very Jungian and integrated nicely with the feminine as well.

For my MFA, I ended up creating a series of eight self-portraits, entitled Self-replicating Self-portraits. In them, I made direct references to western painting but also to my Korean Heritage. There was a strange primordial and feminine synchronicity between the east and west that I embraced. My painting Clam Girl was inspired by both Botticelli and the female Korean Haenyeo divers, and in all of my paintings, it seemed that the Eastern integration brought something more dangerous and ruthless to the softness of my Western art historical references. It was a serendipitous combination that I really liked.

I also repeatedly used self-portraiture in the series of paintings, which began unintentionally. It wasn’t until the paintings were hanging all together, lined up like a procession or frieze at the RDS Awards exhibition in the RHA that I saw a relevance to my self-portrait. My individuality seemed to disappear in the repetition, and it allowed the paintings to embody something beyond my own likeness. And where each iteration of myself started as an exploration of the feminine, the series as a whole seemed to have more to do, in the end, with beauty: its duality, danger and even its neurobiological connection to the earliest parts of ourselves. Despite beauty’s post-modern dismissal, I think that this is where my practice sits currently – in the exploration of beauty, in instinct and the subversive.

I am currently looking more closely at the medieval Unicorn Tapestries in a collaboration with French tapestry artist, Bettina Saroyan, supported by the Arts Council’s Agility Award. The series of tapestries have inspired both of our works for its enigmatic play with the secular and religious, order and nature as well as beauty. The collaboration should be further strengthened by the fact that I will be in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais this summer.

My journey back to art practice has been a fortunate one. Alongside the RDS Awards, I was shortlisted twice for the Zurich Portrait Prize at the National Gallery and was highly commended for my 2021 entry. I am finally making a career out of what I love to do and, last September, joined the Painting Department at NCAD as an Assistant Lecturer.

Vanessa Jones is an American-born, Dublin-based visual artist working in oil on canvas. vanessajonesartist.com