CHALK HORSE now represents Laura Jones

Chalk Horse is thrilled to announce the representation of Sydney-based painter and printmaker Laura Jones. Jones will present new works with the gallery this year at Sydney Contemporary in September.
Laura Jones (b.1982) is a painter of the natural world. Her work is well observed and deftly painted. Working primarily in the genres of still life, portraiture and landscape, Jones takes these genres and makes them new. What Jones is attempting in various ways is a post-humanist approach to nature, one where the human viewpoint is decentred. Nature is the starting point, for Jones: the particularity of a certain place; the specificity of a species of flower; a certain environmental issue. The subject is approached in all its glory but also with an eye to its fragility and ecological sustainability.

Stylistically her work is gestural and immediate. Shapes of petals and leaves, or twigs and lips are expertly drawn with sure calligraphic strokes. Her attention to the singular beauty of certain flowers and their special characteristics was honed in one of Jones’ previous careers as a florist. Jones fuses the botanist’s eye with the poetry of an artist. Sometimes the precarity of nature is embodied in paintings and prints that threaten to fall apart and fray at the edges.

Jones is an adventurer and puts herself on the cutting edge of environmental study. Jones has been admitted to closed labs at Heron Island and the Australian Museum Lizard Island Research Stations. In 2018 she travelled to Antarctica with the World Wildlife Fund on a boat with researchers and other observers. Often the beauty of her paintings belies the seriousness of the subjects they represent. For example, Pink Flannel Flowers, Jones’ Wynne Prize entry in 2021, was a rare species that blooms only after heavy smoke and rain, and after the 2020 bushfires, flowered on a scale never seen before; Jones hiked with her father in the Blue Mountains to find the fields of pink, which only lasted for a few weeks.

Running parallel to her painting practice, Jones is one of the foremost practitioners of printmaking in her generation. A master printmaker she no longer runs her own press, however, her expertise allows her to collaborate and explore with other well-known printers (such as Whaling Road Studios). Jones’ work continues to become more ambitious and bolder in colour and painterly effects. The vitality and freshness of her monotypes and canvas works are astounding, and if anything, only highlight further what a great drawer in paint Jones is.

Jones’ painting has been commended in many prestigious awards from the early days of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship Art Scholarship to the Archibald and Wynne Prizes. She is held in the Artbank Collection and internationally in private collection.