Alison Jones

www.alisonjones.co.uk

'My paintings in Ch-ch-changes are from a series titled Art House, from the interiors section of W magazine. Masterpieces of Modernism; nudes by Picasso, De Kooning, Dubuffet, and contemporary works by Barney, Newton and Ruff are considered in their owner’s homes: art’s habitus of wealth luxury and distinction.

The teaching advice that made most impact on me came from two artists who I spoke to both only once. At the Slade Paula Rego talked to me about finding the question deep inside you that keeps you awake at night, that worries you, that won’t leave you alone, that comes back again and again. For me that was some messily entangled feeling about art, class, gender and power. I felt this feeling sharply as a provincial teenager gloating over my first Vogue and the exclusive worlds of fashion and high culture. And although years in art school have given me the intellectual tools of Marxism and Feminism to theorise the fetishism of commodities (and art’s peculiar place therein) and the commodification of sex, I am not over it, I’m still turning over the same conflicted feelings. Michael Craig Martin who I also spoke to only once talked about visual curiosity, which I understood for me was really feeling the texture of the thing I couldn’t get over - a velvet drape in smoothly sponged-on paint, the glaze on a porcelain vase in a thin wash, the pattern of a Versace cushion with sharp geometric brush marks, the precise cut of a couture dress in a crisp black edge.'

 

Exhibited at Griffin Gallery in Ch-Ch-Ch Changing in April 2013.

(Last updated 11.12.2014)

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