Kim Vose Jones MFA '12 was awarded a $10,000 Creation Grant through the New Brunswick Arts Board in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. The Creation Grant program is designed to provide assistance to professional New Brunswick artists for the research, development and execution of original projects in the arts, allowing artists to devote some or most of their time to research and creative production.
Kim Vose Jones is a Fredericton-based sculptor and installation artist working primarily in fiber, glass, and construction materials. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from MECA&D. Kim studied glass blowing and casting at Alfred University in New York and earned a joint-major BA in Women’s Studies and Religion from Concordia University in Montreal, where she graduated with distinction. Vose Jones’s immersive art is a fusion between sculptural work in a space, the world around it, and the experience of the viewer, and draws upon theories of abjection and the sublime to question commonplace dichotomies. She has shown her work internationally and is currently a lecturer of Fine Arts at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.
Publications
Read "Gimme Shelter: Madness and Death in the Art of Kim Vose Jones," written by Edgar Allen Beem in the Union of Maine Visual Artists Maine Arts Journal / Spring '16. Read an interview with Kim Vose Jones: "Conversations with Writing Topography Artists" for Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
What was the inspiration for your recent work?
"Last summer I was awarded a MECA&D Alumni Artist residency at the Jenny Compound in Baie Ste. Marie, Nova Scotia. For that residency, I was working on a larger installation project for UNB Art Centre entitled Sensorium. The house I was living in was on the ocean and isolated. I would ride around the area on bicycle and talk to the locals in the area. I was struck by the tiny houses along the coast that clung to the edge of the earth and the people who choose to remain there even though they were facing economic crisis and dwindling populations. I began to create the community in miniature using interface paper, and blanket stitching together the walls of each house, leaving the last thread hanging from the house to entangle with the next."
"Those little houses became the study for the larger silk house I developed for Sensorium, which I eventually developed into a separate piece for the McCain exhibition. The silk house was a peek inside one house, one complicated relationship. So I was working on them together and they became very connected, the micro and the macro view."
What was the development process like from your initial idea to the finished work?
"While I was an artist-in-residence at Baie Ste. Marie I would see these tiny wooden houses gripping the sides of cliffs, and communities once vibrant weathering slowly, but still trying to hang on to a way of life that had sustained them for generations. The very industries that fed also destroyed, and this is a precarious balance. I began to think about this planet with its core dug out, and the communities entangled together for support and necessities. It also points of course to general relationship entanglements."
"As another part of my gathering of information I spent two years traveling the roads and towns around the province of New Brunswick. I would be driving through these fantastic vistas and then it would be just gone. I started thinking about duration and space and I wanted to give a sense of the vastness of the place by creating a video that changed over time and reflected the real, the mundane and the spectacular. There are three kinds of film making processes involved: stop motion, durational single shots and photomontage. I was trying to mirror the pace of my movements, what my eye lingers on. . . "
Featured Work in Page Header
Kim Vose Jones MFA '12, Entangled Community, silk, concrete, aluminum, Mylar, stop-motion video, 2015. This sculptural installation is a meditation on immurement, and deals with the tensions inherent between shelter and confinement, absence and presence, protection and abandonment.