LAURA JONES

Life

Laura Jones was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1982. She spent her childhood in Kurrajong, a small town on the foothills of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Jones received her BA in Asian Studies from the University of Sydney in 2003 and completed her MA in Printmaking at the University of New South Wales in 2006.

Along with her artistic practice, Jones has participated in several research projects focused on environmental issues, previously joining the Australian Museum Lizard Island Research Station and Heron Island Research Station to study the Great Barrier Reef. In 2018, she travelled to Antarctica with the World Wildlife Fund.

Jones is the recipient of the prestigious Archibald Prize 2024. She has been finalisted for several other art prizes including the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Portia Geach Memorial Award, and The King’s School Art Prize.

Laura Jones Artworks

Taking inspiration from her personal experiences and affinity with nature, Jones creates impressionistic renderings of plants, landscapes, and people.

Flowers

Jones has long explored the flower and its arrangement as a subject in her work, emerging from her previous career as a florist. Jones’ still lifes of flowers include White waratah arrangement (2013), which depicts a vase full with orchids and waratah, a flower endemic to Australia. In some exhibitions, the artist has shown her her paintings alongside floral arrangements in the gallery.

In addition to painting delicately arranged flowers in her studio, Jones has painted blooming scenes found outside. In the triptych Bushfire Ephemerals - Wollangambe wilderness (2021), Jones painted a field of pink flannel flowers near her home. Considered a ‘once-in-a-lifetime mass synchronicity of flowering’, the rare blossoming of these flowers were triggered by the 2020 bushfires and heavy rain across Australia.

Environment

Through her work, Jones poetically yet pointedly reflects on climate change. Between 2016 and 2018, she undertook research residencies at the Great Barrier Reef and Antarctica, working with scientists and local communities to study the effects of global warming on nature. Her ‘Bleached’ series (2017) are paintings of underwater scenes at the Great Barrier Reef, in which vivid corals appear alongside their pale counterparts. In Bleached, her solo exhibition at Olsen Gallery, Woollahra, in 2017, Jones showed the series with glazed and unglazed stoneware paperclay sculptures mimicking the forms of bleached corals. The Listening Ship, Jones’ solo exhibition at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, in 2020, concentrated on her experience in Antarctica, comprising depictions of melting ice caps rendered in abstracted but decisive gestures.

Jones received the Archibald Prize 2024 for her portrait of Tim Winton, an acclaimed novelist and passionate climate activist.

Exhibitions

Laura Jones has held solo exhibitions at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Sydney; Glasshouse Regional Gallery, and Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, both in New South Wales. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Artbank, Sydney; Kogarah Library and Cultural Centre, Sydney; and Chiang Mai University, Thailand.

Website and Instagram

Laura Jones’ website can be found here, while her Instagram can be found here.

Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024