Born female, Welsh, Catholic and incurably inquisitive, Yvonne Jones followed her curiosity with determination. Moving from a financially poor childhood into education. Jones initially qualified as a teacher of Maths and Biology, at Notre Dame College, UK (B.Ed.), a stepping-stone to art colleges in Liverpool and Winchester, gaining a B.A. Hons. Fine Art, an MA with Dist. Fine Art, followed by an art practice-led PhD. Fine Art, from Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
Her achievements can be seen at https://www.yvonne-jones.net/about-exhibitions--collections-awards-and-support.html with solo and group shows, including work shown in the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She was selected for inclusion in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2004 with the video Eye of the Artist, showing the replacement of a lens within her eye, it was selected by Dinos Chapman. Her work is included in the unique collection of Contemporary Women Artists at Newhall College, Cambridge, UK.
Mutually supportive, Jones collaborated to establish opportunities for artists. As a founding and active member of ArtSway, she enabled the Gallery to present at the Venice Biennale 2005 – 2011.
Trained as a painter, Jones also works with video, and installation pieces. An installation of built canvases is permanantly sited in the Cancer Research Centre, University of Southampton UK, where she was artist in residence for two years.
Jones works from the heart. Her early work centred on painting the places and people she loved. As her work broadened and matured, she was faced with a life-threatening Cancer diagnosis. Undeterred she absorbed this into her developing work, gathering external material and evidence from willing medics, together with internal material of her own physical, emotional, and psychological experiences. Her work can be uncompromising and challenging.
From this point her focus has been the human unit and how it exists in today’s world. She defines herself as ‘An emerging-posthuman (feminist) Artist’ referencing her self-discoveries experienced through her PhD art practice research ‘Peeling the Body’ (https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/)
Returning to painting, mixing, and matching, her work evolved into increasingly abstracted work, building up canvases of differing shapes and sizes to explore and express her experiences, ideas, and philosophy.
She continues working on developing built canvases, to reach her audience and expose the dilemmas of living today, in an increasingly posthuman world.
