Poppy Jones' first monograph spotlights ninety works made over the past four years, foregrounded by a conversation between Jones and Los Angeles-based artist
Paul Sietsema.
At once time-specific and timeless, Jones's intimate still lifes sit somewhere between painting and object, with haptic surfaces crisply contained in aluminium frames. These window-like works show domestic items from her rural East Sussex home, fading into the soft suedes and jewel-toned cottons and silks that constitute their supports. Each piece incorporates photography, lithography, and watercolour on found fabrics, including swatches from the artist's own clothing.
Throughout her methodical process, she embraces fingerprint smudges and other such "mistakes" which make their way onto the surfaces, and some of her larger works include a seam running down the centre, further evidencing the second-hand nature of the reused materials. Among these dimmed vignettes are sources of light: the glow of a reading lamp, the satin sheen of tulip petals, or the sunlight beaming from the blank pages of an open notebook revealing tender moments suffused with a quiet beauty.
Jones maintains an interest in the path by which art, design, and fashion enter the cultural canon, finding resonance in history as well as the everyday. Some works, for example, are printed on the same material as their depicted object, in a process which at once destroys the subject and offers it a new life. In her neatly contained constructions, Jones exposes the alchemy of objects, drawing out their liminal existences and potent evocations.
Poppy Jones (born 1985 in London) is a British artist working primarily with traditional printmaking techniques, tools and materials together with painting, indelibly imprinting passing moments in time on to surfaces traditionally common to clothing (suede, silk or leather). Her
works offer a set of personal fragments, an abbreviated autofictional record of the culture at large. Her process is led by intuition and the paintings emerge from the artist soaking up impressions of the things that surround her and photographing them. Their photographic origin lends them a poignancy—they capture a time of day, the angle of a shadow, dust motes in a ray of light. A windowsill, an open book, a zipped jacket, a lit candle, flowers drooping in a vase. Her works present a kind of incomplete inventory, a partial view, or a portrait of someone just out of shot. Jones works on silk, suede or cotton, in canvases sometimes cut from her own garments or items she has sourced online. These materials are often true to the images themselves as well as being connected to her life.
