Portrait of an Artist – Darren Jones

It can be difficult to chart the progress of a contemporary artist's work, especially without the benefit of hindsight. But it's also exciting to witness at first hand the evolution of artistic practice, noticing the subtle shifts in thinking about elements like form and context or the renunciation of material. Emerging with a strong artistic voice, the development of Scottish-born artist Darren Jones is worth taking a closer look at.

After completing a one-year foundation course in Edinburgh in 1993, Jones moved to London, graduating from Central St. Martin's BA Fine Arts (Hons.) in 1997, which included a one-semester stint at the Pratt Institute in New York City.  After graduating, he set up the collective 'Shopfloor' in Hackney, along with fellow artists Jo Wilmot and Coco Hewitt, embarking upon his career and showing all over the UK. Jones was always thirsty to develop his work, for it to continuously evolve into something that spoke about our experience of existence as a collective species. This struggle would sustain him for several years in London and culminate in his relocation to New York City.

I met Jones in London in 2002. We both worked together and built a kinship around our shared interest in contemporary art.  Plus he's a good laugh. His work at the time was focused mainly on identity, both national and personal, with Anselm Kiefer being, and still remaining, a major influence in his work.

Jones's best work at the time consisted mainly of deconstructed, but deceptively complicated, images such as 3-D wall hangings of shredded tartan cloth, and luxurious, visually-captivating silk flags of Scotland and Great Britain, replacing the familiar red, white and blue with varying colours and patterns.

But to me, his most poignant work at the time was his burnt paintings. These painted canvases were of various British national flags and Scottish visual iconography, charred and partially destroyed by the flame and heat. The result was a sombre, introverted, somewhat violent inspection of the structure and myth surrounding national identity, exploring what it means to be Scottish, or British, or any other nationality. I came away feeling that national identity, like our own personal sense of self, is fluid, ephemeral and dynamic.

For a few years around this time, Jones began a diligent search for the next level in his work.  To this point his work had ultimately been about identity, in all its incarnations, and he was becoming increasingly disenchanted, sensing he had gone as far as the work would take him. He seemed to hunt out tirelessly for the next phase of his creativity. In 2005, he made the decision to enrol on the MFA in Mixed Media at Hunter College in Queens, New York, and he has never looked back.

After floundering for a few semesters, his work settled into "subtle, effective comments and artworks that intervened upon or suggested the possibilities, the likelihood, the potential for failure and the faded hope of the human condition. Not in a morbid fashion, but in a melancholy or sentimental or nostalgic way."  One significant way that Jones has changed his work is through the abandonment of painting, a major decision seeing he was primarily a painter for the past several years. "I left behind the stretched frame of the square canvas and abandoned painting completely... Painting could no longer contain the breadth and increasingly economic and conceptual foundation of my interests and style."

Breaking out of this claustrophobic artistic focus, his new work now stands firm and looks outward to a collective consciousness, investigating broader issues such as the stigmatisation and fear of disease and AIDS in Invivo Invitro, and the creation and propagation of myth in the current exhibition Cryptoreal: Art and Myth. By expanding his own personal archaeology, his work breathes and resonates with relevance and commentary on wider social constructs and issues.

The work, Invivo Invitro, is for me Jones's most challenging and cathartic work to date. This work is more an event than an object. A friend of Jones's, stricken with AIDS, allowed his blood to be drawn into a vial and, in a symbolic act of unity and compassion, Jones mixes in his own blood, in effect 'contaminating' it as well, albeit within the safety of the vial. The final revenge, however futile, comes when the virus in the blood is exposed to the air, ensuring its death. The remnants of this event are documented in abstract drawings and splatterings, the ink being the blood.  This work confronted not only Jones's fear of AIDS but also mirrors our own intuitive fear of coming into contact with disease.  Even though the event was carefully planned and aided by medical professionals, the act itself was therapeutic in that Jones killed the virus which has itself claimed so many lives.

Another project that expands Jones's oeuvre is his involvement with the Flushing Waterfall Fund through his Artist in Residence at St George's Church in Queens. The aim, initiated by a church volunteer named Roy, is to raise funds to build a waterfall in St. George's Churchyard. "I thought about how amazing this idea would be to see a waterfall in the middle of the urban environment of Flushing Main Street, a moment of contemplation in the rush of the day and it struck me that this was the kind of change that will create the Flushing of tomorrow." Similar to the fascination with Scottish history and identity of his earlier work, Jones sublimates this interest into the future history of his adopted home and how he can contribute to it in a meaningful, lasting way.

Becoming involved in curating can be seen as a natural progression for artists, and Jones is no exception. Making a vital and progressive contribution to the contemporary art scene in Queens and New York, a recent curatorial intervention took the form of the exhibition Cryptoreal: Art and Myth at Francis Lewis Gallery in Flushing, Queens in January 2009.  This group exhibition of 12 artists, including Jones, explored the mechanisms of myth and how and if they differ from religion. In his piece You Will Find No Answers Here, Jones asks, through the catalyst of water, why it's socially acceptable to believe in the 'miracles' of the Old and New Testament (Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus walking on water, the blessing of Holy Water, etc) but ridiculous to believe in cryptozoological creatures like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. The artists deconstruct myth from a variety of sources like the media, folklore, religion, and political systems, and by revealing and playing with the semiotics of myth, allow the viewer the opportunity to glimpse into and question their own belief systems.

2009 promises to be another year of self discovery for Jones. He will contribute work to the Queens Museum of Art which will question, in the context of the museum, the role of art in the everyday versus the institutionalisation of art in the museum or gallery setting. As new art has become more liminal and distant from those without a specialists knowledge in the language and philosophies of contemporary art, how can it remain relevant and engaging? Jones will tackle this and other important questions such as the role of the institution, the viewer, what is art now and why does it matter.

It's inspiring to see an artist come out the other side of an exasperating - but necessary - struggle to find their own creative voice: now resolute, confident and reborn. The renaissance of Jones's artistic practice is best seen through his work Nebula; a sculpture consisting of a floating disco ball surrounded by a multitude of seemingly worshipping horseshoe crab shells, all found washed up on the beach. It looks absolutely glorious with the light and the primordial curvature of the shells.  Together with the title and the circular design, it evokes a powerful cosmological metaphor to his own creative journey to find elusive Inspiration, "the desperate clamour of the horseshoe crabs as they work their way towards the life force of the glitter ball".

http://darrenjonesart.com/