Born in Surrey, England in 1934, Morgan Jones was living in London at the time of Blitz. The experience of spending many of his schooldays locked underground in a claustrophobic air raid shelter left him with both an abiding horror of fascism and an appreciation of the physical and psychological power of architecture.
On leaving school, Jones worked briefly in a London bank before joining the Forestry Commission, where he learned wood carving. By his early twenties, finding the English class system increasingly oppressive and looking for adventure, he accepted a job with the New Zealand Forestry Service, moving to Christchurch in 1955. After attending Teachers’ Training College there from 1958-59, he spent many years as an educator, largely at small, sometimes sole charge, rural schools throughout Canterbury.
A self-taught artist and author of detective fiction, Jones has been making sculpture since the mid-1960s. In 1975 he received the Hansell’s Sculpture Award and in 1985 he was profiled in Art New Zealand. Currently represented in many private and public collections, his 2004 sculpture, SCISSOR, stands on the Christchurch Art Gallery forecourt. Made from painted steel and standing almost four metres high, SCISSOR is a classic example of Jones’s elegant and playful sculptural practice. Its symmetrical black sections interlock and oppose each other to form what Jones has described as a ‘visual anagram’. Like all of his work, SCISSOR has its origins in an ordinary object – a Yale padlock. As Jones has said, “the best things you make are simple – they shouldn’t be complicated at all”.
In 2004, Christchurch Art Gallery hosted a major retrospective of Jones’ work: Journeys and Decisions, and in 2019 he became the first New Zealand artist to win the Aqualand Sculpture Award, Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney. His Coreten steel sculpture The Sun Also Rises, was gifted by Aqualand to be part of the North Sydney Council’s public sculpture collection.
“Jones’ work offers simple yet rigorous constructions that celebrate the work ethic and labour of farm industry and its machinery. Each is a proposition and an enquiry, that shuffles chosen elements and fragments to resolution point. He sculpts out of visceral conviction, wanting to simplify the complexity of functional objects and charge them with symbolic significance… There’s an authenticity to the way he represents craftsmanship involved with agrarian labour – either as an observer or participant, he has experienced shepherding, sheep shearing, crop planting, harvesting, haymaking, scything, tree-felling, digging, pruning, and splitting wood.”¹
“There is a sense of exploration in Jones’ work – a sense of someone testing and trying-out solutions and developing sequences of scale models, impelled by the tension of immediate discovery… His art offers an expulsion of the inessential, in search of how sculpture might best represent our experience of time and memory and inhabiting the world. His presiding metaphor is the industrial machine, but pared down and made abstract, anchored by gravity. His distinctive and consistent approach to sculpture, with its comic touches, has as its context the pragmatism and functionality of New Zealand primary production – forestry, agriculture and mining. At heart, his work is in dialogue with the industrial basis of modern society. He both exults machinery for its easing of our labours and decries machinery for its ability to imprison us and make us march to its rhythms.”¹
“There are a few simple shapes that Jones has often used in his sculpture. These select shapes are there to condense and strengthen the visual rhythms found in the various tangle of objects that make up the industrial world. The shapes are also rich in associations. The curve for him is one such shape. When a curve appears, usually as part of a circle or a hemisphere in a work, it brings to mind the wheel: train wheel, cartwheel, chariot wheel, tractor wheel – or an engine’s flywheel, a millwheel. The power and elegance of the parabolic curve is undeniable, and Jones salutes its role within the grid of supply and transport. The hull of the container ship, for example, supports cargo literally, and conspicuous consumption figuratively. The container-ship hull is essential to international trade and transport. The curve is a basic form in mass-manufacturing and is found in cylinders, poles, tubes, pillars and columns. Celebrating the curve, and the cylinder, Jones shows the modern world itself rests on solid principles of design. His riffs on the cylinder as a utilitarian object have created various stacks of cylinders arranged in layers, called, for example, Cairn & Buoy.”¹
Determining how a sculpture will fill space is addressed in Jones’ process. “Making tabletop maquettes, gluing them together then sanding and painting them, allows Jones to achieve this haptically, by sense of touch as much as sight. He can calibrate and calculate using his hands and fingers, then work through sequences of tactile shapes, employing a few self-imposed restrictions or rules to develop multiple variations on a theme. His aim is to choose from the best of the sequences and then construct sculptures which are resolved in form and made of one material with a hard finish. Coreten steel that weathers, or an opaque skin of paint in a single colour, serve to unify and bind the whole construction. All parts are equal. Each sculpture rests on the ground, becoming its own pedestal.”¹
While best known for his free standings sculptures, Jones also creates 3D works for the wall. “In the early 2000s, Jones began to consider and explore the sculptural symbolism of the ubiquitous desktop computer as an exemplar of industrial design that might provoke emotions, such as awe, amusement, exhilaration, fear.”¹ Including both free standing sculptures and wall works, in this series of computer inspired works, “Jones uses an anonymizing matt white as part of his sculptural investigation of the computer shapes and computer devices made possible by microelectronics and microprocessors. Matt-white deepens or heightens the particular emotional resonance he wants to convey. The unitary white shade in turn suggests a state of mind: alienation and distance; or else a fugue state, a numbness; or perhaps the stillness and quiet of the small hours of the morning. White is a form of reduction, a way of focusing the eye on matters of absence and presence. White is about clarity, precision, proportion, and the clear analytical lines of the machine.”¹
Now a nonagenarian, Jones has not given up creating, but has simply changed his medium. His new maquettes and 3D white wall works are now created in card.
Drawings in Space includes a range of wall pieces. With several colourful works in plywood (1991-2002), and white computer inspired wall works (early 2000s), the exhibition features his most recent series of white card wall works (2023-25). Illustrating Jones’ process, Drawings in Space also includes many maquettes and two large metal sculptures.
¹ from Solid Geometry: Sculptor Morgan Jones by David Eggleton