Garry Jones, painter, screen printer and sculptor was born at the Sydney Women’s Hospital in 1964 and raised in Green Valley in the western suburbs of Sydney. Some of his earliest experiences of racism were at school where he was constantly told that “his lot” were trouble and that he would “never make anything of himself”. These experiences led Jones to believe that he did not “fit in” with his environment and gave him an early understanding of racism within Australian society.
Jones has always been creative and was known at school as “the artist”. His uncle, the well-known artist and cartoonist, Danny Eastwood, guided him from an early age but he did not begin seriously to create work until he was studying for his Bachelor of Science (Architecture) degree at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in the late 1980s. Jones’s work discusses identity, racism, abjection and alienation and it is “honesty and self-exploration and awareness building that motivates and guides my practice.”
Jones was hung in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 2000, that same year he won the Works on Paper section of the National Indigenous Heritage Art Award in Canberra with his work Thirroul 1. The judges of this award commented that it is “a highly accomplished charcoal drawing, evocative of length of time and ancestry. The metaphysical layers offer the possibility of intellectual and heartfelt engagement at many levels, yet the work itself is cool and restrained.”
Jones’s artist statement for this award winning drawing states that “the work was produced as part of a series of charcoal drawings following the uncovering an Aboriginal burial site close to Thirroul Beach [NSW]. The work was an intuitive response to the coast over a series of nights and reflections on the process of archaeology in interpreting heritage.” His work was included in Wollongong City Gallery’s “Pallingjang (Saltwater) III” in 2002. In 2003 Jones was a recipient of a Fulbright Postgraduate Award that enabled him to travel to the University of New Mexico in the United States where he undertook research into contemporary Native American visual arts that will be explored in more detail in future studies. Jones currently lectures at the University of Wollongong in Creative Arts at the School of Visual Arts and in Aboriginal Studies at the Woolyungah Indigenous Centre. Having achieved more than his early school experiences predicted for him Jones states that highlights in his life include “learning to like and trust people and recognising that I can have moments of great inspiration and enjoy them, even if nothing materialises from them”.
- Writers:
- Allas, TessNote:
- Date written:
- 2007
- Last updated:
- 2011
- Status:
- peer-reviewed
