Joanna Jones & Clare Smith
Dover, UK
Joanna Jones & Clare Smith
Masks Mirages and the Morphic Self
2020
Masks Mirages and the Morphic Self
Is how we look to others ourself?
Do we recognise ourselves in the mirror?
Are we recognisable in what others see?
Do our self portrait masks reveal or hide?
Joanna Jones & Clare Smith
-
Joanna Jones’s practice over several decades has included a private studiobased painting practice as well as the lateral collaborative structures she has founded with and for artists.
Following a foundation year at Northwich College of Art, Jones continued her studies in London at the Byam Shaw School receiving her NDD in painting from Goldsmith’s College in 1966, the same year as starting the co-operative gallery Zeez Arts with artist Peter Kennard. In 1969 she won first prize in the Greater London Council’s painting competition, exhibiting at the Hayward Gallery before graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 1970. She was co-founder of the London studio collective, The Works in 1973 where she met Carlyle Reedy with whom she worked together closely over the next decade. In 1978 she moved to Germany, establishing her painting practice and exhibiting nationally and internationally. In Frankfurt she collaborated with the Fragile Theatre Company and in Berlin established the Pükler Salon. In 1997 she returned to the UK and settled in Dover where she co-founded Dover Arts Development (DAD) with artist Clare Smith in 2006. DAD is an artist-led, not for profit company that functions as a collaborative, porous framework within which its artist directors conceive, manage & deliver ambitious projects within the visual arts, poetry & music. DAD advocates for & actively pursues a strategic role for the arts in placemaking & for the benefits artists bring to Dover & the South East. Jones has a residency space in her home for visiting artists and hosts events and conversations that have Dover at their heart in the DAD Urban room. She is represented by Galerie Gilla Löcher in Berlin.
CLARE SMITH lives and works in Dover where she co-founded Dover Arts Development with Joanna Jones in 2006. Her mixed English/Chinese heritage informs her perspective on issues of identity and categorisation. Frequent travelling as a child and young adult mean she has a somewhat ambivalent relationship to place, reinforced by the sense of ambiguity that comes from her mixed identity. She works with drawing, print media, collage and moving image to investigate this ambivalence and what it feels like to actually be in a place, with references to craft, the importance of labour and the handmade. Through her choice of materials and approaches, she creates work which attempts to create a sense of unity, an interpretation of Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space” – seen as a space in which different parts can come together to challenge dominant ideas of wholeness. Smith runs a shared studio space for 7 artists called the Dover Studio Collective which hosts an annual Printfest and Open Studios. She was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019.
