Corinne Jones. Drunkard’s Path

About

The exhibition’s provocative title refers to a quilting pattern that combines rounded shapes to create a meandering motif resembling a drunkard’s staggering walk. Jones is attracted to the idea that simple shapes and colors stitched together can be a vessel for signifying and imbuing meaning.The pattern, which is centuries old, evolved in this country in the years before and during the American Civil War. Narrative quilting was a means of sending messages and recording history. According to oral histories quilts were hung outside during the Underground Railroad to both give direction and warning to those fleeing enslavement. The Drunkards Path pattern signified that one should zigzag to throw hunters off their trail. It is a story of incredible resilience. Women made the Drunkards Path quilts and used them to support the abolition of slavery. Later the quilts were sold to promote women's rights when the name was co-opted by the Temperance Movement. 

Drunkards Path is the latest iteration of Jones’ ongoing series Flowstones. The abstractions have thickly layered surfaces and spatial ambiguity that alludes to passages, portals, veils, escape routes and landscapes. The paintings reference early modernism and share the ethos of that era: equity, autonomy, and humanity. However, in Jones' work there is no utopian vision. In the untethered reality of today, her paintings are a search for the “desired path,“ a pursuit more cerebral rather than visionary. Alongside the latest abstractions are Casting Out Sevens, a series of non-objective color field paintings. The seven-sided equiluminant works are autotelic yet cast attention to the paintings around them.