When Laura Jones returned a few years ago to live in Kurrajong, in the Hawkesbury, northwest of Sydney, it wasn’t just a return to the region where she grew up, but a return to both a particular place and a specific landscape; one that she knows well, almost innately, and loves deeply. Yet despite Jones’s personal connection to her local environment, and her relationship with it, she is not in control of her subject, and the river that appears like a protagonist in her paintings is its own being; able to change its “personality” (and both its course and flow) in response to manmade or natural obstructions, and the unpredictability of changing weather patterns. Jones revels in the different characteristics of this familiar body of water – the Grose River (which runs through the remote bushland of The Devils Wilderness before joining the Hawkesbury River), playing, in seemingly quick brushstrokes, with the effects of light at different times of day, and with the joy of capturing, in paint, the transparency of water and the various reflections that dance upon its surface.
For the last few years, Jones has served on the board of Bundanon, the home and creative sanctuary of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd from 1979. While resolutely her own, there is a whisper of Boyd in Jones’s paintings of the Grose, and the elder statesman’s colourful and powerfully expressive images of the Shoalhaven (on Dharawal and Dhurga Country) have become an important part of the artist’s visual memory. In painting this landscape, Jones helps us to feel this location with all our senses – to experience the crackle of dry Australian heat, to hear birdsong, and to see the water at its most still, like a mirror. Just as the Boyds’ gift of Bundanon to the nation in 1993 serves as a powerful exemplar of custodianship of the land and of our responsibility to ensure its safekeeping, in appreciating the particularity of Jones’s place, we come to understand that it is representative of something much larger – a global ecosystem in need of our protection and care.
– written by Kelly Gellatly