Blue Queen, 2015

Standing ‘totem’ sculptures have been part of Jones’s visual vocabulary since the mid-1960s, as seen in works such as The Third Man (1964–65). Around 2010 Jones returned to his totem motif, but this time predominently in acrylic. While retaining the box-like structure, more fluid forms that refected the curves, bulges and poses of the actual human body were used. Stylised heads, with cut acrylic profiles and tresses of flowing flat-planed hair top these sculptures. Painted colour is sprayed and smeard on the plastic surfaces. The use of found objects from the 1960s series such as rope and pairs of shoes was extended, with objects encased within these vitrine/bodies.

Blue Queen (2015) has a solid blue body, with a flat paint finish. It’s bold form and colour shares an affinity with the work of the Memphis Group from Milan, founded by Ettore Sottsass in 1980. In Jones’s sculpture the focus is drawn the muliple facets of the transluscent blue face. Cut and folded to form two profiles facing in opposite directions, the piece evokes a Janus-face, and speaks to Jones’s ongoing fascianation with doubling and the encapsulation of multiple bodies and multiple genders within one figure.

The shadows cast on the walls in proximity to the sculpture are important for Jones, creating what he terms “virtual drawings in space”. In his sculptures, as in his paintings, conventional distinctions between surface and form, and image and object dissolve, demonstrating Jones’s ongoing reinvention of the figure and the act of looking.