Paul Jones
Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Exhibition
Exhibition: 16 September – 22 October 2005
The new works shown in this exhibition were made over the course of a year with the support of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and exhibited for the first time in Standpoint Gallery.
The starting point for Paul Jones's new body of work was a tiny image, a blot like shape, sampled from the background of a cell in a Manga comic. This blot was expanded throughout the works as a recurring motif examined in a variety of ways. Jones's practice is evidently sculptural, however, the methods he uses rely very much on drawing, although more in the sense of extrusion than that of mark making. He has questioned what the blot could be – a two-dimensional mark, or the portal to an endless void, or the footprint of a towering peak.
A central point to the work is the relation between the microcosmic and macrocosmic, inner and outer space. Jones plays with a heterotopian sense of the potential simultaneous existence of seemingly incompatible locations within one space or site. To this end, Jones collides portions of what could be tracts of terrestrial (or even extra-terrestrial) landscapes with domestic objects. This manifests as relief images imposed onto and through surfaces, also, as 'growths' that could be parasitic or spliced to objects. Much of the three-dimensional aspect is created through a latticing of contoured card; additionally he has been exploring the potential of laser cut and routered marks.
Jones has commented that the creative process of the past year has been akin to the experience displayed by the protagonists in the movie Close Encounters. A feeling of working blind with a strong force driving him to create this 'thing' but unsure what it is or what it will be. It seems an apposite metaphor for his work as an artist, of this earth and aware of space here as we know it, he acts as a medium for drawing into the equation other spaces of the universe that are understood but not fully defined and through his sculpture tries to visualise and make sense of dimensions we have not fully absorbed into human consciousness.