The Geometry of Longing

2 - 25 November 2023

Chalk Horse Gallery

The ‘Geometry of Longing’ is about the clash between the natural world and human emotion. The small picture of domestic life meets the big picture of the sublime. They eat at each other, not always happily. Ageing bodies in ageless landscapes. Intimacy and anonymity. Connection and solitude. The city hitting the country. Laura Jones casts her eye past the bloody obvious to see the vulnerability in mundane events and settings. Therein lies doubt. But also wonder. The night comes. Then we wake up and make sense of what may or may not be the case.

Music For Trees

16 August - 3 September 2022

Sophie Gannon Gallery

i was at IGA looking at some flowers for a dinner party at laura’s house. i picked out a dreary bunch of daisies. as i was paying, a bee buzzed around my ear and landed on my earlobe. it whispered “the sun is too hot and the water is too wet.” i brushed the bee off, grabbed a coffee and walked through the park towards laura’s.

while strolling through the park a bird landed on a branch near me and chirped a little. perhaps if i could understand birds it would have said “what a glorious day!” or “why have you bipedal creatures destroyed the natural balance of our ecosystem with your clanky shiny machines?” whatever it was, a dog barked at it and it flew away.

i arrived at laura’s house, and saw that on her dining table, she had an absurdly large alchemists jar filled with water lillies in full bloom. the bottom of the jar was filled with murky green water and frogs. the jar was almost fogged out by the steam from this swampy mixture. “what a curious object!” i thought out loud. a frog looked up at me and wrote in the steamy jar walls IN SHREK VOICE: WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY SWAMP?!

i got home later that night and facetimed my girlfriend, who was living in new york at the time. “did you get the dozen roses i sent?” it was our 4 year anniversary. “yes,” she replied “although they are slightly annoying, they are singing WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) by Cardi B over and over.” i smiled nostalgically at her through our phones, “yes that’s our song remember?”

Jason Phu 2022

The Wynne Prize

5 June- 26 September 2021

Art Gallery of NSW

“This breathtaking triptych by Laura Jones stretches over three metres when hung on the wall; its blooms of colour overtaking blackened branches and burnt banksias. A finalist in the 2021 Wynne Prize, the work is a poignant reminder of particular recent events: the damage wrought by the 2020 bushfires, and the blossoms – seeds germinated by smoke and rain – that sprang to life in their wake. But in our current times of uncertainty and loss, it also shows us a vivid, hopeful strength that can help us during the dark days; capturing a complicated relief and joy without erasing any of the sadness beneath.”

The Garden

4 December 2020- 14 February 2021

Manly Art Gallery and Museum

By Elli Walsh

Artists have, historically, looked to nature as muse, yet today we see it shifting into the role of martyr. It is silently suffering, burning, melting, dying.

The natural world has played protagonist in the life and art of Laura Jones since she was a child growing up in the Blue Mountains. Jones’ joyfully rendered paintings sing of the fertility, abundance, continuity and sublimity of nature, and yet beneath this colourful opera is a melancholy hum; a sorrowful melody that grows louder and louder with each unfolding hour. In her paintings, we see nature as martyr – whether in the bleaching of the reef, the devastation wrought by the wildfires or, simply, the allegoric connotations of conquest embedded in the floral still life.

Jones’ new series, ‘The Garden’, summons anthropocentric conceptions of nature as a means to human ends: as a garden ripe for governing, enjoying, curbing and harvesting. However, hedging this economy of consumption and control is an alternate ecological apparatus: the ‘Symbiocene’, a speculative era of coexistence and eco-homeostasis, when life on Earth isn't destroyed but instead nurtured by humans. Just imagine! Enlisting as an apt microcosm the destruction and regeneration of Australia’s fire-ravaged landscape, Jones forges a future vision in her paintings where flora and fauna flourish in symbiotic splendour and life sprouts from the ashes of our failures.

In recent years, Jones visited Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef, as well as undertaking residencies at the Australian Museum’s Lizard Island Research Station and the Heron Island Research Station, working closely with scientists, researchers and local communities to explore the relationship between humans and ecology in a time of climate change. But ‘The Garden’ marks her first ‘home’ series, capturing the plight of the artist’s – and our – backyard. The paintings are inspired by many bushwalks through the Blue Mountains, Hawkesbury and Ku-ring-gai areas. Fusing the tenors of Romanticism with Realism, Jones poeticises the beauty of these landscapes whilst reflecting on the ruination of the Black Summer bushfires, which directly affected her family, friends and community. In the wake of the fires, the artist would traverse the blackened bush with her father, siphoning his deep botanical knowledge about which species will regenerate and which have permanently perished.

Many of her paintings feature the charred skeletal limbs of banksias, cleaving the canvas like a bed of cracking ice. These works take us on a topographical journey from aerial longitudes to frontal proximities as we weave our way through an analogous network of arteries, roads, rivers and webs. A shivery sense of post-fire melancholy manifests in the white ash negative space engulfing the forms. The banksias recede as if space was solid, sinking into the viscous background with osmotic vehemence. Their feeble branches quiver against the surrounding paint, threatening to dissolve into the brisk yet tender brushstrokes. In some of the works, the charcoaled banksia branches separate the ground into a tectonic patchwork of earthy amorphous forms, creating an abstracted cartography of the bush. This energetic tussle between form and space nudges the eye to see holistically; not at the plant alone but its environs – bare as they may be – and the sense of mutualism between the two.

Drawing on her past experience as a florist for prominent Sydney flower shops Grandiflora and POHO, Jones delights in orchestrating compositions – physically or on the canvas. In the studio, vessels of flannel flowers and foliage become synecdochic proxies for the worlds conjured by her brush. Yet in her Burnt Banksia sculptural series, she subverts the age-old still life by staging charred stems on charcoal-clad bases in a way that solidifies negative space. Collected from the bush in the footprint of the fires, these specimens function as silhouettes; haunting spectres of their former selves. We are reminded of the didactic tradition of the memento mori, each ailing limb emblemising the mortality of the biosphere. Perched on plinths, they are shadows casting shadows in a double negative that speaks – or rather whispers – of the anthropogenic void that we are plunging into.

Though the chromatically neutral banksia paintings and blackened arrangements juxtapose the bounty of colour in other works, there are cadences of fertility and abundance resounding in the unique ecology of the banksia – specifically, the adaptation of serotiny sees the plant’s seed release triggered by fire, and the presence of lignotubers enable it to resprout after fire. Jones utters this dormant hope in the limbs of the sculptural branches, which are crested with gaping pods containing the pledge of new life.

This discursive space of nature opens up inevitable contemplations of anthropocentrism, which pivots on the ultra-rationalist idea – echoing Protagoras – that man is the measure of all things. Jones’ ‘The Garden’, however, presents a parallel world sans humanity, where flora and fauna coexist in perfect polyphony. In the centrepiece of the show, Arcadia, Jones enlists the paradisiacal garden of the Greek mythos ‘arcadia’ to deliver not a lofty Eden but rather a very real prospect for the future. Within this immersive diptych is a space primed for transcendental experience, like a frame from Disney’s Fantasia, where life exists in magical coalescence. Ulysses butterflies flutter about and King parrots jump between branches, their movement matched by the energy of the flora which pulsates from the canvas in palpable fecundity. Flannel flowers dance in dainty flair while flowering gums seem to bloom before our eyes, exposing their golden pistils, and waterlilies burst forth from rocky depths watched by the bulbous black eyes of Sturt’s Desert peas. A Goliath Stick Insect masquerading as a branch leads our eye up to an orange-speckled spider dipping down and surveying the utopian scene. Harmony. Buttressing such oozing aesthetic energy is an olfactory tenor that wafts into the viewing space, bringing sweet scents of wildflowers and the damp rejuvenating aromas of earth and stone. At the same time, we can hear the scurry of a mountain dragon splice through the wheeze of the wind and the gentle rustling of leaves. Jones’ arcadia is a sensory orchestra that celebrates not merely the vast sublimity of nature but the beauty and humility of each moving part. Though the works trumpet a universal ideal, she situates her arcadia firmly in Australia. To see the painting, physically in the exhibition, the viewer must first walk through a ravaged local landscape populated by burnt banksias and slowly regenerating earth, arriving, eventually, at arcadia. A future fantasy-reality.

These are micro landscapes – not ‘postcard paintings’, as Jones says – built from experience, photographs, mementos and imagination. Harnessing an observational approach, the artist absorbs her surroundings and downloads them onto her canvasses via the thin membrane of memory. Her inspirations are many – from trips to the zoo and scientists she’s met, to walks in the bush and children’s science books found outside her studio on the free bookshelf. In the compositions, single point perspective is shattered, making way for new ways of seeing, and being. She gives us multi-topographies rendered in thin conversational layers. ‘I’m an honest painter’, explains Jones, ‘I like to show the mistakes; and the thin bits against the thick bits’. Her process is laid bare in this exhibition through the display of drawings, studies, a video, objects, palettes, plein air paintings, and fragments from her studio, looping the viewer into the ‘joyfulness’ and ‘mess’ of painting. ‘Mess is the most beautiful part’, she asserts.

In these works, Jones does away with temporal clarity. Everything blooms at once in a dazzling parade, with the cross-pollination of evening and morning, Summer and Spring. In kuringai flannels, the pearl white petals of flannel flowers glow in the sun, and yet a velvety night-time shadow carpets the blooms. At the top of the canvas, abstract swathes of autumnal orange descend like a sunset in Turner-esque swathes. It is as if the flowers are floating towards the sky, slowly drifting upwards until they disappear into the thinly painted oblivion; the patches of raw white canvas creating a reflection of their earthly form.

Today, it is tempting to read all renditions of the natural world through the lens of ecological crisis, to distil the collapse of nature even from within splendid displays of vitality. For Jones, the muse and the martyr are one. She captures the suffering, certainly, but also the resilience. She memorialises mortality yet seeds the promise of new life. The garden may be ravaged, but deep beneath that which is burnt, bleached and barren lies the hope of restoring an arcadian world. This symbiocenic vision is, for Jones, summed up by Brian Eno: ‘The only way that we will save the planet is by falling in love with it.’

The Listening Ship

21 July - 29 August 2020

Sophie Gannon Gallery

By Oliver Watts

Today I saw a seal surfing at Bondi Beach on Instagram. For the last month or so too I have followed all the weird and wonderful sightings of whales on their exodus to warmer waters. A six-metre spine washed up on the shore at Eden, NSW, cleaned by feeding sharks, but still smelling rotten. Our cities on the sea are full of half formed connections to Antarctica.

As a continent it is really, for all intents and purposes, a modern invention. If whalers and sealers were secretly visiting in the 1820s it was not really until the 20th century and even the late 20th century that research stations were set up in earnest. The most enduring historical legacy of that period was the explorer hero, names like Shackleton, Mawson and Scott. For those that watched The Crown you’ll know that Prince Phillip visited at Christmas in 1956 as a part adventurer, part royal nodal point to mark the greater reaches of the Empire. But there were also scientific missions at play in races to the pole:  geological information, the glacial time frames, and the new animals. Antarctica pointed to bigger truths about the planet’s formation and our place in it.

Now in the contemporary moment Antarctica is perhaps even more present in our minds. If the planet is our home then the travelling scientists are the home defects inspector. They search in the basement of the world looking for the cracks that point to a bigger subsidence yet to come. Climate change, which is usually quite an abstract idea, is materially present in changing ice flows and cracked off icebergs. Professor Tom Griffiths has written, “Antarctica does not only prompt logistical, political or intellectual questions; it implicates and challenges our humanity.”

It is in this context that Laura Jones joined scientists and benefactors of the World Wildlife Fund on their 2018 mission. From the beginning Jones was challenged by her presence on the ship travelling for two days to the Antarctic Peninsula. The whole experience put Jones in an equivocal position on a number of fronts and her paintings I think embody this feeling. Although the images are grand and sublime they are also provisional and finished in a way that privileges the stuff of paint as much as the image. The works are fragile and seem to be falling apart a bit, like Antarctica itself.

The artist as adventurer has a long lineage. Prince Phillip for example brought along Edward Seago to paint the prince on ice. Nolan has visited, Edward Wilson and John Davis. Jones like these artists has found the metallic rainbow of colours in the ice. The deep cobalt of the glacial ice, so compressed by time and pressure that very little air remains, is made by light refracting in such a way as to cut all red waves from the picture. The black ice is an effect of light when a thinnish layer of transparent glassy ice is laid just above the deep ocean like a huge bathoscope. The reflection is cut in such a way that you get an immediate window onto the deep blackness. Many of the works show a mirrored reflected landscape that is a common sight on the polished wind and water whittled surfaces. All these opalescent sights and pearl visions Jones has brought back to us (for people that are unlikely ever to set foot on the seventh continent).

On the other hand although rarified, even the small number, tens of thousands a year pre-Covid, of Antarctic tourists is becoming too much. Jones is aware of that fragility and felt the whole time that she didn’t really belong there. Like astronauts the environment is so desolate and harsh that not without all these supplements and prosthetic garments could anyone actually ever survive. Food that was served in the warmth and comfort of the ship also felt strangely out of place. As her watercolours froze and everything seemed hard, Jones was not wholly convinced of the Romantic position of the seer artist.

 Jones’ beauty is also shadowed by the contingency and uniqueness of the Antarctic; once the utopian modernist approach wore off you were left with other realities. The paintings are beautiful but also show collapsing ice shelves. If the sea continues to warm, if more bright orange artefacts of man encroach, then the red of the krill might diminish, upsetting the whole food chain. Jones connects this series to her Great Barrier Reef series by showing the coral that sits on the continental shelf. The biodiversity is astounding and unknown by most.

Antarctica is so cold and desolate that even now much of what we know of the continent comes from satellite imagery. That Jones actually went, and visited, speaks to her insistence on accounting through her own eyes and through paint what she sees. In collaboration again with scientists and other thinkers Jones uncovers not just her own grand vision. Her images link to the great landscape tradition but also more contemporary and anxious concerns. Sometimes these mountains of Antarctica seem almost green as her palette fuses the reality with other fantasies of the landscape genre.

Arcadia

7 March - 19 April 2020

Glasshouse Regional Gallery

By Mariam Arcilla

Love and grief

And floral wreaths

The human heart

A coral reef.

-Omar Musa (1)

A mohawk of chartreuse-green bananas, nearing ripeness. Troops of flannel flowers in post-bloom malaise. A needle-bunched 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.”

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.

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 heat-sensitive 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)

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.

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

   Accessed 5 Feb, 2020: https://imagejournal.org/article/marc-quinn-matter-life-death/

Bleached

17 May - 14 June 2017

Olsen Gallery

By Associate Professor Jane Williamson, Macquarie University

Laura Jones’ smile is magnetising but it’s not the most enticing thing about her. She has a passion for painting that is almost beyond her ability to control. It could be said that Laura is a vessel from which her art flows. It makes her driven, a perfectionist, and someone who cares deeply. I recognise this passion as it parallels the passion that I have as a scientist.

Laura’s “Bleached” is an important conduit between science and art and should not be taken lightly. The phenomenon of bleaching, caused by heat stress associated with warming waters, is one of the most catastrophic environmental issues occurring in our lifetime. Historically, the ocean has been a stable force with the capacity to buffer environmental change. More recently, however, we have reached a tipping point where oceanic forces can no longer maintain stability in the face of anthropogenic impacts such as urban runoff, pollution and those associated with climate change. Aspects of the oceans are changing at a rate faster than ever recorded in millions of years. Such rate of change is predicted to increase exponentially over time if we don’t change our way of life, particularly reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Roughly the same size in area of Italy, it is the largest living structure on our planet and is clearly visible from space. Sir David Attenborough recently called it “one of the greatest, and most splendid natural treasures that the world possesses”. Two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef have now been severely impacted by substantial coral bleaching. The top third of the reef experienced intense bleaching in early 2016, and in the past few months the middle third of the reef has suffered from a more devastating bleaching event. The extent and severity of the bleaching over the past twelve months has literally left coral reef scientists, such as myself, in shock.

As Laura Jones’ art portrays, however, all hope is not yet lost and we should not merely give up on saving the reef. While bleaching of corals and anemones is commonly a precursor to death, many of these bleached animals are still alive but extremely sick. Once temperatures are elevated, corals and anemones release the majority of tiny symbiotic algae that they cultivate in their tissue as a desperate attempt at survival. These algae produce nutrients essential to the animals’ persistence and, providing the temperature does not remain elevated for longer than six to eight weeks, the animals may re-absorb and grow more algae and thus potentially recover. If an elevated temperature event extends beyond the animal’s resilience capacity, the animals will die. Resilience to such environmental perturbations changes between species and populations, and is largely determined by an animals’ genetic composition and state of health prior to the event. Therefore, a healthy reef is usually a more resilient reef.

I have smelt the rotting flesh of dead coral from severe coral bleaching at Lizard Island in 2016. Yet amongst the graveyard of corals there remained life. Individual colonies that appeared remarkably untouched by the event. Colour between a haze of grey. These corals were Laura Jones’ first hand experience of the reef and she was clearly amazed by their design and colour. While assessing bleached corals was a vital component of her journey for this exhibition, I felt it important that Laura also experience a healthier reef to understand the enormity of change. I therefore suggested that she also visit Heron Island, a coral cay in the southern Great Barrier Reef. The reefs around Heron Island hold an important place in my heart as my students and I have been researching this ecosystem for over 20 years. During this time, I have witnessed changes in the reef communities there: some good and some bad. To date coral bleaching has been an insignificant force at Heron Island and the reef still maintains vibrant and diverse communities of corals and other animals. The beauty and reverence of the reef that enchanted Laura at Heron Island is evident in her drawings and paintings from this trip.

Laura’s art has uniquely captured both the devastation of coral bleaching and the hope for recovery. She has achieved what many scientists have tried to portray – that we must keep fighting to save the reef. There is still time. Just.

Bleached

17 May - 14 June 2017

Olsen Gallery

By Professor Michael Gillings, Macquarie University

I became a Biologist because I am fascinated by the natural world. Its colour and its beauty, its serenity and chaos, its constant surprises; all provide an endless source of discovery, enlightenment and contemplation. My two favourite places on the planet are the deep red deserts of Central Australia, and the crystalline blue of the Great Barrier Reef. People often think this is a curious combination. But to me, these places have many similarities. Both have an amazing diversity of organisms. Both are vast and ancient ecosystems. Both are some of the last wild places, distant from the crush of human population. But both of these ecosystems, distant and isolated as they are, cannot escape the influence of human activity. And as a biologist, I cannot stand idly by while landscapes and ecosystems become degraded.

The Reef, in particular, is in trouble. Biologists, climate experts and environmental scientists all know this. We also know what the causes are. Human activities release excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This raises global temperatures, including water temperature. High water temperature causes corals to expel their symbiotic partners, thus ‘bleaching’ the coral structures. Because corals depend on these partners for their nutrition, they starve and die, and their skeletons eventually get covered by ugly brown algae. There is an even more insidious problem. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the oceans. This makes the ocean more acidic. And corals are made of calcium carbonate, which dissolves in acidic water. This means coral reefs are in big trouble. Some people think that reefs may not outlast this century. It’s really hard to address these problems, because their causes are global. Using fossil fuels in Cairo, or Copenhagen, or Canberra; all contribute to the global carbon dioxide burden. And despite scientists collecting and publishing more and more data, and despite their warnings about the consequences, there is an inertia, and sometimes an outright denial of the facts, that prevents action being taken.

This is where Art and Artists have a really important role. Science and facts speak to the brain, whereas Art and Artists speak to something deeper: To our hearts and our souls. Enter the Artist, Laura Jones. I first met Laura at the Australian Museum Research Station on Lizard Island. This is one of the most remote laboratories on the Great Barrier Reef, some 250 km northeast of Cairns. Laura had organised to be Artist in Residence on the island. She went there to understand reef ecosystems, and prepare for a major shift in her artistic practice. She wanted to record the reef, and witness the ongoing bleaching events at first hand. We shared a laboratory for over a week, and it was one of the most interesting experiences I have had for a long time. We shared ideas, and learnt about how each of us practiced our art. Her curiosity, enthusiasm and drive were obvious, as was her concern. Our conversations also confirmed things that I had suspected for some time. Art and Science are actually very similar occupations. On the negative side, we both have trouble getting funding. We both sometimes have our work copied, or stolen. On the positive side, we get to do something we are passionate about, and that makes us want to work every day. We are curious and imaginative.

There are also deeper parallels. Artists and Scientists use similar processes. We observe the world, we ask questions, and we draw conclusions. We then try to communicate these observations and conclusions to a general audience. We do this to make people feel; to make them think; to engage them; and help them understand what we see. However, many people think that Art and Science are polar opposites. As long ago as 1959, CP Snow talked about ‘The Two Cultures’. He was referring to the two great areas of human achievement – the Sciences and the Humanities. It was his contention that the divide between science and the arts was a major impediment to addressing global problems. So, I do want people to understand and address global problems. But the Science is done. More facts, more experiments, more publications; all these will do is improve our understanding of how soon, and how bad, the changes will be. Laura is part of the solution to this dilemma. She recognises that by starting a dialogue with scientists, she can influence and drive change, through her art. Re-uniting Art and Science, these two great human activities, has a great power to precipitate change. The power, the beauty and the provocation of art is an effective way to get people to listen, and to act. So as you admire Laura’s deft brushwork, her sensitive palette, and the beauty of her creations, I want you to think upon one thing.

All this beauty could be gone in a generation.

I woke up like this

15 Oct - 14 Nov 2015

Chalk Horse Gallery

By Oliver Watts

Laura Jones’ exhibition I woke up like this, turns the gallery into a portrait gallery; instead of headmasters, heroes or saints though the portraits are of close friends and fellow (often creative) travellers. The title of the exhibition subtly directs the viewer to the way women present themselves as their natural self when they dress and put makeup on for a night out. It is also an appropriation of a line in an equally tongue in cheek Beyonce track Flawless (that also directly addresses feminism and the constraints on women). Behind this “authenticity” lie numerous subtle tricks of seduction and social power. Jones paintings can be seen the same way: they hide behind their surface a matrix of social interaction and friendship and feminist politics.

Jones works hard to allow her sitter to express themselves through their own choices including clothing and pose. The clothes are all models own and in this show almost become a character themselves. The images are still and relaxed and do not have the high energy of a photographic selfie. In this way her work can be seen a little at odds with the contemporary world, a refuge even. The paintings have in them the time in the studio, the chats over a cup of tea, the shared discussions of anxieties and loves. The studio becomes a home, a space of femininity (as Griselda Pollock might say); it is a space that allows for possible resistance and strength.

Ann Elias in her recent book Useless Beauty has made a thorough working through of the floral still life tradition in Australian art and some of her conclusions are provocative and apposite to Jones practice. Although not illustrating the book Jones has read the book with interest. The still life is seen as a gendered genre, a woman’s genre, from Margaret Preston to Margaret Olley. It is traditionally domestic, feminine and beautiful. By focusing on this genre, and indeed the female portrait, Jones knowingly engages with this lineage. It represents a poetry of the intimate, the friend and the home and in this way women’s power.

This is perfectly mirrored in the generosity of spirit behind the painting of the work. Jones’ work, whether portrait or still life, is based in studio observation. She sets up her subject in her studio and draws from life. Her work exudes a stillness and mindfulness that has struck a chord in many people. She is an astute observer of texture, colour and line and looks carefully always at “the thing” in front of her; her paintings never fall back on an overarching style or method and there is a searching quality in her work.

There is a beautiful humility to this approach. John Berger described why he drew a little everyday even though he abandoned painting for writing, “It is that rare thing that gives you a chance of a very close identification with something, or somebody, who is not you. So maybe it is not so different from storytelling after all”. I like this reading of observational art. It is not about the Self seeing better (as John Ruskin would have exhorted) but about getting outside yourself altogether. The question is not what do I want this rose to look like but more how does this rose want or demand to be painted.

In these works Jones has turned her studio into a stage to profess admiration and love for the strong women around her. Although, like flowers, the works lead with a complex surface beauty, what really unites them is a deep respect for their subjects. It is this respect, in relation to the usual honorific oil portrait, that really sets out the shows political dimension; young women, not old father figures, are shown in pride of place along the line.

Punch

22 November - 21 December 2014

Gallery Ecosse

Walking into Laura Jones light filled studio in Sydney’s inner west is a transformative and restorative

experience. After trudging through its gritty streets, her work space - which is flooded with diffused

natural light - overflows with tableaus of flowers in vases and glass containers which contrast starkly

to the industrial surrounds of the building. The move this year to a new studio in Sydney from her

previous one in the Southern Highlands has coincided with a shift in the work towards paintings

which glow with an intense luminosity and new-found verve.

As painter of still life, Laura works in a genre that continues to evolve and adapt with the times

despite its traditional origins. She utilises finely honed observational skills to capture the fleeting

beauty of flowers but without being overly concerned with the minutiae of a botanic artist. Her

engagement with still life continues to reflect her own experiences of life. A sojourn in New York

earlier in the year has inspired an invigorated composition and approach to her painting.

In this her latest exhibition of paintings entitled Punch, Laura incorporates richly patterned fabrics

with flowers in vases and jars in an explosion of colour and life. In the work Marrickville Still Life the

viewer looks down upon a table set with fruit and flowers that appears to be flattened into an

unexpected perspective, challenging the way in which we expect to view the scene. Laura continues

to explore the painterly qualities of her work, some of which pay homage to Matisse’s interiors, and

develop this into a visual language that she has made distinctly her own.

Laura Jones is an artist of great talent and commitment and her approach to her practice has been

rewarded in this group of paintings that consolidates her reputation as an artist on the ascent.

Jane Watters

Director, S.H. Ervin Gallery

Shadow and Soul

June 2014

TDF Collect, Melbourne

Catalogue Essay by Lucy Kaldor, June 2014

The hydrangeas in our garden bear flowers of an unmarketable hue. The base colour is grubby, faded apple green, like the upholstery on a collection day couch. On top is a rash of rosacea pink. These are the colours not of romance, but of neglect and root damage caused by a neighbouring conifer. Yet every summer the starved shrubs divert massive resources to their mop heads. The flowers are layered like scales and the upper petals (they are actually sepals but let’s call them petals for now) shelter their understudies from the sun. And beneath each sunburnt, topmost petal is its own shadow, stencilled for perpetuity on the petal below, in a colour as pale and fresh and unblemished as a cabbage leaf. It’s magic.

I love these hydrangeas because they remind me of the enormous generosity represented in the act of blossoming. A flowering plant gives everything it has, even when it hasn’t enough. ‘This is my best’, says the plant in full bloom. And it is the generosity that is beautiful, as much as the material result.

This is what I see, and love, in Laura’s work: every painting is a blossom of her soul, and like my hydrangeas, every painting has her best. Her generosity shines brightly, even when the paint is dark and she is feeling dark inside, as she was, she told me, when some of these were painted. Bits of underpainting are visible in the final works, like cardigans half-buttoned and hair untied. Vulnerable, sensuous, earnest and disarming, Laura’s paintings have everything to give and nothing to prove. They are not shown so much as entrusted, and they make me feel worthy.

Flowering is an act of biological compulsion performed with the grace and humility of love. This is what I imagine painting must be like for Laura Jones.

Light is Fugitive

8 February - 21 March 2014

Gallery Ecosse

By Leslie Rice, February 2014

This collection of paintings by artist Laura Jones, assembled at Gallery Ecosse in the early part of 2014, derives its title Light is Fugitive from a quote by celebrated Australian artist Margaret Preston. Light can indeed prove an elusive quality for painters to capture, and the history of the discipline is littered with the efforts of those of us who have made this our concern. The act of making a painted record of floral arrangements is of course an attempt to arrest the fleeting nature of their short life span, and an acknowledgement of the ability that oil paint possesses to make manifest and permanent that which is fleeting and transitory. From the frescoes and mosaics of ancient Rome and egg tempera tomb paintings of ancient Egypt, through the still lifes of the Dutch and Flemish tradition and in the works of moderns like Monet and Van Gogh, the tradition of flower painting has itself proven hardy. Indigenous Art aside, Australian painting has a brief history, and many of our important Artists have been inspired to paint flowers - Margaret Olley, Grace Cossington-Smith and Margaret Preston are all counted amongst Laura’s influences. For Olley, flowers were a way to eschew fashionable trends and paint what she found around her; for Cossington-Smith a vehicle to experiment with the Modernism seen in European painting of the time (notably Post-impressionism and pointillism), whilst Preston produced robust works that reflected at once these concerns and her own keen interest in Indigenous Australian painting.

Laura’s own interest in painting flora stems from a life lived amongst them – she has trained and worked as a florist. Lamenting a disinclination for Australian native varieties by many who order floral arrangements, Laura prefers to combine softer foreign examples with their hardier indigenous cousins, as in Clematis and Banksia Still Life (2013). Laura’s handling of oil paint demonstrates a range of touch - at times confident and sturdy, in other passages more tentative, perhaps self conscious. At all times, however Laura indulges in the sheer joy of colour. Hers is a rich and full palette, where one gets the feeling that every hue has been considered, but judiciously employed. The works are unashamedly decorative, which is not to say that they are mere decoration – Laura’s paintings regularly hold their own amongst the works of her contemporaries in a growing number of prizes and group shows. It simply means that the idea that Art can be beautiful (a notion considered at one point by some passé) is something in which Laura Jones, like a growing number of her contemporaries, still believes.

With Flowers

2013

Maunsell Wickes Gallery

By Nicholas Harding, January 2013

Laura Jones has a wonderful way to describe drawing form with paint: “It’s like dropping a blueberry onto yoghurt. The way the surface gently holds and cups the berry”.

Recently Jones has been looking at flowers and painting them, working the tradition begun with depictions of still life found in Egyptian tombs, developing through Roman murals to the still lifes imbued with religious symbolism of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, then burgeoning with secular fascination since the Dutch Golden Age and painters such as Maria van Ooosterwijk. Along with the development of oil paint, this tradition continued on through to Modernist transformation with the likes of Manet, Van Gogh and Hockney. Sam Fullbrook was an Australian artist inspired by the colour of the flower growers’ gardens he grew up amongst in Chippendale, and he used flowers as a means to painterly lyricism.

Jones’ motivations are also poetic, not concerned with the tyranny of description. Soaking up floral splendour during the course of her flower shop day-job also affords her the opportunity to seek out possible motifs which, once chosen, are taken to the studio where these brief flourishes of nature are placed in a vase on a table. As soft light from the warehouse windows bathes the colours, astute observation and imagination come into play as a series of possibilities to be explored begin to present themselves. Most of these will be discarded but others will be chased and seized as the discipline of process takes command and blooms of paint form into abstract invention.

Jones takes what is required from her forebears, such as Matisse, Bonnard and Nolde, reforging it into her own visual language. There is a succinct affinity with the nature of paint evident in the supple flux of her brushwork. In Flowering Gums the cool ultramarine vase anchors the vermillion blaze of blossom mass, all deftly held in a harmony of muted pinks and greys. These works may be figurative but their ambitions are abstract. In Slipper Orchid we can see how Jones pitches the fore-, mid- and backgrounds across the same compositional plane, the colour intensified to reflect the pleasured sensibility. The dappled colour-field shadows of the wall behind the vase of blooms in Summer Flowers echo the forms of the flowers themselves and we can see how she holds the shape of the cerulean table-top by painting in the space behind it. Her “cupping” of form is splendidly realised in the way the umbers sensually embrace the gentle fall of the petals in Poppies.

In an often jaded world these radiant elegies refresh us and we are reminded to appreciate life’s transient affirmations.