HEATHER JONES BIOGRAPHY
Heather Jones is an artist who uses abstraction and color to comment on the historical and socio-political relationship between women and textiles, and explores the relationship between gender, place, time, and culture in her work. Her practice continues the story of geometric abstraction inherent to women’s patchwork found in the Southern and Appalachian regions of the US, and her work is steeped in the history of quilt making and a vast group of unknown female makers. The subject of her work is unequivocally feminist: she chooses to work with fabric rather than paint, in reference and reverence to the fact that the fiber arts were often the only type of art that women were encouraged to practice for many years throughout history. Conceptually, Jones’ work carries on the tradition of woman as maker, pushes the boundary between fine art and craft, and questions the definition of painting. She documents the story of our current world, particularly the female narratives that are often neglected from history. By working with geometric compositions, Jones creates a universal visual language to tell these stories, using textiles as a reference to issues of domesticity.
Her work has been exhibited widely at national and international venues including the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH (solo); Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH (solo); Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH (solo); Art on Paper, New York, NY; Aqua Art Miami, Miami, FL; Marta Hewett Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; Iowa Quilt Museum, Winterset, IA; New England Quilt Museum, Lowell, MA; Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, NY; the University of California, Berkley, CA; Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; Boecker Contemporary, Heidelberg, Germany; drj- dr. julius | ap, Berlin, Germany; Five Walls, Melbourne, Australia; and M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine. Jones’ first book, Quilt Local: Finding Inspiration in the Everyday was released in October 2015 by STC Craft, an imprint of Abrams, New York.
A native Cincinnatian, Jones studied art history at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning, earning both a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts (ABT). She currently lives outside of Cincinnati, Ohio on a small farm with her husband and two children.
