Katherine Jones RA
Katherine Jones’s work has a lightness of touch with a twist of strangeness. Trained as a printmaker (2001—2003: Camberwell College of Art, MA Fine Art Printmaking and 1998—2001: Cambridge School of Art, BA (hons) Fine Art Printmaking) and gaining experience in print editioning for other artists after graduating, she is probably better known, at least so far, for her own editioned, hand-pulled collagraphs. Her subject matter has been described as referencing ‘perceptions of safety and danger’; the home, containers, shelters, nature, clouds are all references that we imagine seeing in the lines and shapes that make up her images and that we satisfactorily pin to this theme. Yet sometimes the idea of describing an artist’s work in words is not enough because these ideas are huge and wide-ranging, but it is in the looking that we really comprehend the specifics. Explaining the line of enquiry that she pursues is deliberately vague, allowing us to pin these, and our own, references onto it. The description, Katherine says, has probably come about retrospectively when looking back over what she has done and trying to assess how, collectively, to describe her intentions. Yet when I look at the paintings and prints scattered around the walls, across surfaces, filed in drawers and tucked into portfolios, I just somehow know they are from, and of, her. The best thing is, she can’t really define that, she just is who she is.
When she was admitted to the Royal Academy as an Academician in 2022, “no one was more surprised than me”, she said, and is still unsure about how it happened. New candidates are usually proposed and voted for by existing Academicians, but the candidate does not make the approach or even know about the vote, until the invitation is sent. The Academy represents the ‘Establishment’ and is, for many of these elite artists, an enviable badge of achievement. For Katherine it brings a reassuring endorsement from her peers and elders, some of whom she has admired for years. It is finally an opportunity for her to look with humility on the bright side of the months spent questioning what and why she does what she does. She is naively modest and becomingly so. For the Royal Academy’s 2023 Summer Exhibition she curated Room V, called ‘Wishes Of Others’, which is no mean feat and I am curious to follow how this accreditation may bring new opportunities to shape her career in the future.
