Sculptor Profile

Morgan Jones

An extract from the NZ Listener
Like dancing to architecture
by David Eggleton"

For Morgan Jones, to borrow German architect Mies van der Roh's immortal catchphrase, less is more. Jones is a master of the reductive impulse, a maker of rigorously crafted geometric abstractions that function as emblems of energy, generators of metaphor. Entering the gallery that houses his sculptural installation Moorings, you the spectator move around his array of pieces much like the absent kinetic elements they seem to be symbolically interacting with: the flowing currents of water, or air, or electricity, or – yes – time.

Jones has been making sculpture since the mid-60s and came into his own in the mid-70s when he combined constructivist principles (that is, industrial materials and design) with New Zealand's rural vernacular architecture. He won the national Hansell's Sculpture Award in 1975 and thence established himself as among the leading artists of his generation. It was all part of a distinctive life journey, because Jones is self-taught as a sculptor, and also an English immigrant who came out to New Zealand in 1955 when in his early twenties.

His sculpture continues to function as a kind of dialogue with his adopted country. He fuses the sensibility of someone raised in London during the anxieties of the Blitz, who began working life on the treadmill as a bank clerk, with experiences in a new land that offered other opportunities, a different cultural environment.

Jones's 70s breakthrough was characterised by its celebration of the raw functionalism of New Zealand's landmark architecture. He managed to simplify and refine those great signifiers of place, the shearing stand, the sheep race, the angled corrugated-iron roof, the barbed-wire fence, as more than just exercises in the grammar of building. They were a way of probing ideas; they were an exploration of the processes of arrival that lay behind the literalism of, say, 300 wooden steps up a hillside, or a farm's outside dunny, or a farm's meat-safe.

Carefully planned and executed, Jones's sculptures use honest building materials to create a minimalist aesthetic that turns the ordinary inside out. He is the backyard hobbyist turned metaphysician exploring universal dynamism and the poetry of popular mechanics.

(An extract from the NZ Listener by David Eggleton)