Dr. Ruth Jones Essex, United Kingdom

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Dr. Ruth Jones is an artist, independent curator and director of artist charity and studios The Old Waterworks in Southend-on-Sea. In 2023 Jones graduated from UEL with a professional doctorate in Fine Art. In 2022 she was awarded a British Council Venice Fellowship at the Venice Biennale, a residency with Metal Southend and commissioned for a new sound piece by Focal Point Gallery in 2021.

Multi-disciplinary artist Ruth Jones explores the agency available to women and marginalised genders through installation, sound, film, drawing and parody. Employing a range of translucent, layered and ephemeral materials and practices, alongside performance of gender, she investigates the murky line between the losses and gains women experience in their effort to hold on to their bodily autonomy and agency. Her work often takes the conditions, oppressions and experience of women and marginalised genders as a starting point for imagining the installation space. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway, Legacy Russell and Lola Olufemi, Jones' work seeks to create a space where the peculiar conditions of women’s lived experiences can hold necessary contradictions alongside one another and afford them a sense of care.

Jones aims to create installations that can be viewed as a disembodied representation of the contradictory ideas and projections that collide in the social expectations of the “female” gender. Care and emotional labour are often extended to the audience in a parody of ASMR personal attention, delivered in intimate whispered bursts through headphones. Jones' pays particular attention to multi-sensory elements, including smell, light and temperature. Clouds of synthetic aroma are expelled by the installation space – reminiscent of childhood confectionary, sometimes inviting and delicious and sometimes cloying and a touch too sweet. Soft light and materials guide audiences through spaces, making use of fans to shift the air and aroma, and to echo the whispering narrative of the sound work. Through parody of ASMR role-play, the expectations of gendered, caring roles, and the projection of sexualisation onto women and girls in society is relentlessly highlighted and called into question. Large-scale drawings of fleshy bodies are depicted on tracing paper, giving them a ghostly, ethereal quality to comment on the nature of visibility and agency.