Isla Jones, (b.1997, Northumberland) is a London-based artist, who produces figurative work through drawing, printmaking and collage. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University in 2019, and will graduate from the RCA with an MA in Print in 2023.
She has exhibited her work in the UK and internationally, most recently at Southwark Park Galleries in London.
My work situates the female body in nature; investigating ideas about identity and connection through vivid folkloric narratives and fictioned landscapes. In blurring lines between worlds, ideas about the body and its relationship to the environment are navigated, creating a visual language that speaks to the universal human experience.
The body, in turn, becomes a space for continuous mutation and change; existing within nature, either as a hostile force or as part of an ecosystem. Visually, the emphasis often on the undeniable correlations between the figure and its environment. Depictions of symbolic, unfamiliar landscapes and the rituals within them make space for the body to be depicted unusually, characterised by a sense of transformation, fragmentation, and distortion. Figures are consistently close to nature, even if sometimes the landscape seems barren, empty or inhospitable. The world depicted in the work embodies much of the same sickness and beauty as our own but displays it distinctly, perhaps even in a more tangible way.
These visual reimaginings of the world, where the fabric of my own life is cut up and stitched back together, exist as a parallel reality of sorts. Strange women roam the unknown landscapes, as I roam my own. And there is conflict, but it's mostly focused inward; a perpetual contemplation that is described by not only the solitary figure but the figure within the flock, also. The motif of the doppelganger is representative of this type of inner conflict as well, whilst simultaneously being a reminder of the need for compassion toward oneself. Women in particular - who have always been tied to the wild, the untamed, the passionate - are continually at the forefront of the work. And stories containing this particular type of protagonist, or antagonist, are interspersed through the rich histories of myth and folklore, which I have been working from.
In the work, polarities of beauty and discomfort are explored, using disparities between the comfortable and the unknown to create tension; here exists a sense of ambiguity, prompting questions about the broader human experience.
