Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Iona Jones
My work is a nonsensical stream of consciousness, caught between the absurd and the sincere. My role shifts from an unreliable narrator into a ringleader, mad scientist, zookeeper, and nurse.
My practice focuses on brokenness, failure, and repair through repetitive reconstruction. With a Frankenstein-like approach, I take apart found materials and reassemble them into them into forms that blur human and animal boundaries. This method reflects a longing to transform, to become something other, questioning whether my creations add value to the world or detract from it, and whether they are fundamentally good or bad.
The narratives I delve into are inherently fractured, mirroring the flawed and fragmented nature of reality. Emotions are exaggerated, like the melodrama of the pantomime—nostalgia, pleasure, shame, grief, humour, temptation, unease, terror, and absurdity intertwine. Fears and anxieties revert to the simplicity of the Big Bad Wolf. Characters and objects exist in an uncomfortable space, echoing the hauntology of our biographies and collective memories. Seemingly insignificant fragments become archived relics, their repeated use imbuing them with new layers of meaning.
Works
Swan Song, 2024
Swan Song, 2024
Swan Song is an installation composed of several kinetic sculptures and films, each serving as a fragmented piece of a larger narrative.
My work has always served as a means to digest, process, and communicate complex emotions and experiences. After the recent loss of my father, I found myself drawn to recreating the traumatic imagery associated with hospitals and death. These clinical images have seeped into the otherworldly scenes I create, culminating in the central piece of this installation: The Dying Swan. This performative sculpture features a swan enclosed within a 6-foot metal cage, attached to a drip that releases 5 litres of ‘blood’ over the course of the performance. As the blood pools onto the velvet-clad base of the cage, it stains the fabric, visualising the swan’s decay and encouraging the growth of mould, further emphasising the swans deterioration.
Fairy tales, at their core, serve as emotional clarifiers, exploring fundamental human experiences such as disgust, desire, fear, change, and mortality. Francesca Gavin addresses the need for darkness in her book Hellbound; ‘Exploring dark imagery or ideas in art arguably helps to create a sense of control in a world where we have none.’
The Dying Swan, 2024
Wooly Leg, 2024
Miss Piggy, 2024
The Dying Swan, (video), 2024.
The Dying Swan is a film piece documenting a performative sculpture. The piece shows the final moments of a swans life as it bleeds to death. Runtime 3 minutes and 7 seconds. Foam clay, down feathers, paint, varnish, velvet, cardboard, rubber tube, blood, glitter.
