Poppy Jones

The Artist Room is delighted to announce an exhibition of works by Poppy Jones (b.1985, London) following her inclusion in the gallery’s inaugural group exhibition Windows in October 2021. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom in two years and includes new larger-scale paintings the artist has recently been developing in her East Sussex studio.

Jones is internationally recognised for her sensitive and intimate paintings depicting a range of recognisable phenomena: jackets, lamps, water glasses, flowers, candles, curtains, and plants, among them. Developed during the lockdown, her characteristic process brings together oil lithographic printing techniques with carefully applied watercolour painting to create unique ‘objects’ – as she names them – that are the result of controlled experimentation. Each painting in the exhibition is applied to a soft surface material from the artist’s collection of found and sourced suedes and silks, before finally being framed in soldered aluminium with both matt and gloss effects. 

Rooted in the rich artistic history of still life painting, Jones’ paintings ask viewers to pay prolonged attention to objects at once familiar and alien. A Book (The Erasers) (2023), for instance, depicts a book stripped of any writing. Its lack of legible contents perhaps invites the projection of memories and stories onto it. Other works provoke feelings of absence and presence. In Day‘s Close (2023) a bright puffer jacket has been cropped so as to pay particular attention to its abstract and undulating surface. It is left unclear whether a figure lies behind the surface or not, creating the ethereal feeling of humanity without presence. Across all of the artist’s works lies a crucial interest in the intense interplay of light and shadow; their dramatic possibility to create a transient sense of beauty and tension.

In 1989, artist Stephen Willats asked why artists hold the capability to transform objects. He explained that fundamental to creativity is that artists can represent the psychological as well as physical properties in what they see. ‘The object [is] a central preoccupation of our culture,’ he added. ‘It becomes a carrier of society’s idealisations and hence becomes an icon through which people may recognise a dependent system of references that can capture a whole way of life.’ Imaging vignettes into worlds outside our own – yet laden with a particularly familiar sense of interiority – Jones’s most recent body of work asks viewers to consider the often-overlooked impact of our environments on us, and cherish the purity of encounters that are necessarily fleeting.  

NOTES TO EDITORS

Poppy Jones (b.1985, London) lives and works in Bexhill-on-Sea. In 2010, Jones graduated with an MA in Fine Art Printmaking from the Royal College of Art. 

Recent solo exhibitions include Body & Soul, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2023); Interiors, project 36.1 Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich (2022); Cutting Shade, Mrs., Los Angeles (2022); and Bright Sleep, South Parade x Painters Painting Paintings, London (2021). 

Selected group exhibitions include A Gauzy Flame, Herald St., London (2023); La Struttura, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2022); Watch the Fire from the Shore, Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2021); and Windows, The Artist Room, London (2021).