ARTIST STATEMENT
The extraction of organic or inorganic matter from a body or ecosystem is latent with both generative and destructive potential. My practice explores this ambiguity through installation, textiles, writing, drawing, and sculpture. Using materials ranging from cement and silk to pomegranates and salt, I create structures that exude the quiet power of transmutability and invisibility, dissecting the intimate and often violent interplay of bodies and substances and the ecosystems that host them. I draw on the work of queer/feminist writers such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici, and Jack Halberstam, exploring the corporeal and spatial dimensions of the power structures that they articulate. Threading through each material inquiry is the question: What significance, what potentiality, does femininity hold, once liberated from its inverse?
BIO
Emma Fiona Jones holds a BA in Art History and Women’s Studies from Vassar College and an MFA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University. She was the 2025–2025 Mary Heaton Vorse Fellow, and the recipient of the 2023 Dorothy G. Pieper Art Purchase Prize. In 2022 and 2023, she received the Sunwood Student Art Award. She has held two solo exhibitions, hysteria and exile from eden, both at Lawrence Alloway Memorial Gallery in 2023. Her work has been included in the group exhibitions ARTIFICE 004 at CultureHub / Underground Art and Design in 2025, Some/Body at Mr. Kills in 2025, Poor Housekeeping at Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery in 2024, and All Over Again at Alloway Gallery in 2022. Jones participated in the Crow’s Nest Residency in Marshall, NC, in 2022. She has also participated in a number of curatorial projects. She was involved in the curation of two concurrent solo exhibitions of Sonya Clark’s work at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2020–2021 entitled Heavenly Bound and Monumental Cloth, the Flag We Should Know. In 2019–2020, she curated Flesh-and-Blood Contradictions: Medical Racism and the Fight for Reproductive Autonomy at Black Women’s Blueprint in Brooklyn. Jones has served as an editor for institutions including Vassar College, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. She has written for publications including Momus, the Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, IMPULSE Magazine, the Times Union, the Fire Island News, the Provincetown Independent, and the Miscellany News.
