Katherine Jones: Light House

About

Katherine Jones, ‘Light House' New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge 25 July — 21 August Katherine Jones's work follows today's sensitivity towards issues of protection and security using a recurring house shape, subverted structurally and contextually to simultaneously imply nurture, protection and suffocation. Her interest in the disparity between different versions of ancient stories, where repetition and imperfect reproduction has confused the original message also plays a primary role in the work's conception. She works with traditional forms of printmaking in conjunction with drawing and watercolour. She is the current printmaking fellow at the City and Guilds of London Art School and was recently awarded the London Print Studio Award 2009, the T N Lawrence and Son print prize 2009, the Oriel Wrexham - Intaglio Printmaker Award 2009, the Northern Print Biennale Solution Group Prize 2009 and the East London Printmakers Great Art Prize 2009. The series of prints to be shown at the New Hall Art Collection are entitled Light House. They consider the way that multiple narratives and divergent messages emerge between one version of a story or fairytale and another. The visual vocabulary is based around a recurring greenhouse motif that simultaneously represents nurture, protection and suffocation. Aarchetypal house shapes are subverted structurally and contextually - frail and peculiar structures emit otherworldly light to suggest a mysterious or unexpected presence within the seemingly welcoming and safe space. One focus of the work is the emergence and demise of the earliest glass houses, designed and built by Joseph Paxton in the 1800s to house exotic flora and fauna. The immensely ambitious construction and rapid demise of such monumental structures as the Great Stove at Chatsworth House (Derbyshire UK) and the Crystal Palace (London UK), illustrates the inherent fragility of these man-made protective edifices. Ultimately, these early cathedrals of the industrial age were extremely vulnerable and were either dismantled or succumbed to the primeval forces of wind and fire.