Gemma Jones
Gemma paints celebratory, positive, bold, often nostalgic images of women and girls.

The images Gemma uses are a potent intersection between mass culture and the homemade; commercial culture and the domestic. She is interested in critiquing constructions of femininity while at once celebrating the female image.

If Gemma's works are thought of as portraits, they are never paintings of famous people nor even of people she knows, maybe they aren't even portraits. They are mostly taken from tiny, un-noticed pieces of vintage pop-culture - an ad, a brochure, an illustration, an old dress pattern. The girls are hence not anyone in particular and at the same time a single image can at once be a thousand anonymous, everyday girls into which the viewer can project themselves.

She enjoys the way that representation, reproduction and re-representation form their own chain of visual Chinese whispers - and the way that images morph and produce beautiful moments of accidental abstraction. The process of painting is itself important for the artist ... the works as images could much easily be produced as silkscreens or prints (and are often mistaken as such), but the investment of meditative time and the touch of the brush are important. The inconsistency of surface texture which at first glance seems incredibly flat is tied up in this process.

Her work revolves around a play with the mass produced image - reviving and focusing in on a fragment or a moment that is easily dismissed, discarded or forgotten within the bombardment of commercial culture. She pushes the idea of emptying the image of its original purpose or intent. For Gemma an image or a face can suddenly be re-born just like that.

Often using dress fabrics and house-paint, Gemma is interested in the cross over between art, design, decoration, aesthetics, the studio and the home.

Gemma is a collector, a writer and an occasional DJ with a passion for rare sixties soul and girl groups.

In 2000 she completed her Masters degree at University of Melbourne with a thesis on ideas of nostalgia in contemporary Australian art.