G r a h a m  J o n e s:  t a k e n   a n d   g i v e n

5 Jun – 14 Jul 2026

When things are not okay – the personal, the provincial, the living and the indigenous, humiliated by poverty and powerlessness – inversions work to inhibit any assumption of ‘okay-ness’ itself. Innocence suffers, though not without the question of how it can be reclaimed. Psychologist David Watson reminded Jones, during his depression and severe not okay-ness, of the true meaning of re-spect, which is – to look, again. When brute ‘knowledge’ obscures reality, or brute force seemingly eliminates the evidence of life – ‘look, again’.

If everything living holds within it seeds for beauty, Jones has nurtured this potential throughout his life through his creative work as well as his ecological commitments. He honours land as it was and could be, rehabilitating forest and planting indigenous trees to which he tends (over 1000 to date). He also tends to the seeds of his subjects in sculpture, with respect. However, few of these figures in their final sculptural form fully disguise how society has seen them, as commodities embedded in systemic cycles of waste, as profitable labour, trophies or nameless expressions of prejudice.