Poppy Jones’ First and Last

British artist Poppy Jones combines photography with painting to create a series of still lifes that are infused with a strange nostalgia. Through a process of monotype printing and overpainting, Jones transfers her images onto panels of silk, suede, cotton and leather to create a collection of fragments and snapshots of her surroundings. Through delicate shifts in colour, shadow and tone, Jones transmutes familiar subject matters like wilting flowers, half-drunk glasses of water and creased shirts into a poignant and evolving inventory that celebrates the beauty of fleeting moments and everyday objects.

Her current solo show ‘Solid Objects’ is on view at Herald St until 13th April.

First: Paul Nash, Dead Spring (1929)

The first image on my camera roll is a screenshot of Paul Nash’s Dead Spring (1929). I first saw Dead Spring at the brilliant Paul Nash retrospective at Tate Britain in 2016 and have since visited it many times at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which isn’t far from where I live in Sussex. The painting depicts a dead plant on a windowsill. Sliced by geometric rulers, its sense of balance is implied but precarious. I’m drawn to the sense of melancholy, mortality and the strangeness of the everyday that many of Nash’s paintings reveal.

Last: ‘Solid Objects’ exhibition opening at Herald St

This photo was taken at the opening of my exhibition ‘Solid Objects’ at Herald St.

“Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.” – Virginia Woolf, Solid Objects (1920)