Locust Jones

Locust Jones (b. 1963) is a New Zealand born Australian artist working across painting and drawing. His works have been primarily influenced by his travels and close attention and concern to current world political issues. Through his works on paper, Jones challenges and delves into issues of contemporary politics. His style of commentary can be said to tackle the big picture head on, addressing issues of epic proportions, interspersing imagery from the media, newspapers, television and the internet, as well as personal experiences of current political situations in the world. Whether it be climate change, war in Iraq, ghosts of tortured forests or the greed of the global financial industry. He draws from the overlapping feeds of cultural and political information using television news broadcasting, radio, Facebook, and Twitter as sources for his monumental drawings and prints. Jones’ empathic absorption of global political events allows for him to work tirelessly – creating massive, chaotic tangles of hand-scrawled line and text, which explode into fractured pattern and narrative onto enormous panoramic scrolls, or plaster the gallery like wallpaper. In 2012, Jones spent time at DKW creating works that responded to Johannesburg as a complex and contradictory urban site. These works show Jones’s familiar motifs of checkerboard pattern and layered text, combining imagery of haunting faces, anonymous silhouettes and expressionistically askew architecture.