ARTIST STATEMENT
The extraction of organic or inorganic matter from a body or ecosystem is latent with both generative and destructive potential. My practice explores this ambiguity through installation, textiles, sculpture, research, and writing. Using materials ranging from plaster and gauze to pomegranates and salt, I create structures that exude the quiet power of transmutability and invisibility, dissecting the intimate and often violent interplay of bodies and substances and the ecosystems that host them. I draw on the work of feminist writers such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, and Silvia Federici, exploring the corporeal and spatial dimensions of the power structures that they articulate.
Dwelling in the ambiguity of regeneration/decay, desire/repulsion, and control/disorder, I strive to lay bare the overt and subtle violence inflicted upon queer and femme bodies, and to imagine a collective existence beyond its grasp.
BIO
Emma Fiona Jones holds a BA in Art History and Women’s Studies from Vassar College and an MFA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University. She is the recipient of the 2023 Dorothy G. Pieper Art Purchase Prize. In 2022 and 2023, she received the Sunwood Student Art Award. She has held two solo exhibitions, hysteria and exile from eden, both at Lawrence Alloway Memorial Gallery in 2023. Her work has been included in the group exhibitions Poor Housekeeping at Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery in 2024, and All Over Again at Alloway Gallery in 2022. Jones participated in the Crow’s Nest Residency in Marshall, NC, in 2022. She has also participated in a number of curatorial projects. She was involved in the curation of two concurrent solo exhibitions of Sonya Clark’s work at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2020–2021 entitled Heavenly Bound and Monumental Cloth, the Flag We Should Know. In 2019–2020, she curated Flesh-and-Blood Contradictions: Medical Racism and the Fight for Reproductive Autonomy at Black Women’s Blueprint in Brooklyn. Jones has served as an editor for art institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. She has written for publications including Whitehot Magazine, IMPULSE Magazine, the Fire Island News, The Miscellany News, The Island Now, and Creative Arts Advocate.
