Jilaine Jones’s unfolding curiosity

Contributed by David Whelan / If I asked you to make a sculpture about walking through the woods, what would you make? How would you go about expressing an awareness of your body in relation to the dense forest – stepping over downed logs, ducking under branches, feeling your feet against the ground and the sun warm on your skin? In A Walk with D. Ann at 15 Orient, Jilaine Jones suggests that we aren’t just walking through woods but having the experience of being human. There is an emphasis on gravity and things returning to the ground throughout the show. Landscape and motion, forms and space, combine to build emotional weight in the sculptures, asserting a presence while keeping their origins just out of grasp.

Jones studied in the ceramics program at Alfred University, where she embraced the directness of sculpting clay. Later, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she began working in steel. The artist has since oscillated between the two mediums, never adhering to a single philosophy of sculpture, following a path of constant revision and discovery. The gallery itself provides an interesting foil to Jones’s work, as a third component that repeats itseslf through her armatures and masses. Its plaster walls suggest a rich history, the floors have been stripped to raw pale wood, and the entire space is lit with natural light. A lot of work went into making this space feel a certain way, and I was afraid it would compete with Jones’s discrete, formal sculptures. Instead, a fruitful tension emerges, providing the viewer with a more engaged, and ultimately more thoughtful, experience.

Approaching What Surrounds Her House from the side, I first saw an outline of a black rectangle sitting on the ground with a vertical line crossing through it. Composed of thin metal plates, this structure appears drawn in space, barely tangible. In stark contrast, a group of rough concrete forms sit together at the sculpture’s cross-section, organized like abstract still life objects. Sloping down from this center axis, a tear-shaped lump of clay extends out from the sculpture onto the floor. The heavy appendage could be dragging behind the sculpture or crawling forward from it. This pairing of dualities is fascinating: smooth metal with rutted concrete and thin linear forms that seem to disappear, with rounded forms that assert their weight and impart both forward and backward motion. 

Jones works in black and white, prioritizing value over color. As a rule, metal functions as a dark tone, concrete a gray one, and plaster a white one. However, an outlier stands in the last room of the gallery: the elegant title piece A Walk With D. Ann, painted acid green. Punctuating thin, arcing, and taut metal lines are smaller, shorter planes towards the base. Light and breezy, the sculpture looks as if it’s gliding across a landscape. This seems like a departure for Jones, due not only to its color but also to its lyricism and sense of unencumbered movement. Though lighter than the other works on display, the sculpture is tinged with an elusive melancholy. 

On a long tabletop across the room sits Horizon in the Hand 1, 2 and 3, a trio of red clay sculptures with an alluring green patina. To make these works, the artist probably started with long strands of clay, intuitively twisting and snaking them into loose knot-like forms that flop, coil, and point. Their composition is essentially horizontal, such that they resemble a bundle of sticks or deconstructed sarcophagi. It appears to me that Jones was figuring something out in these works, that they served as sketches or quick exercises to warm up the hand and mind. I love seeing an artist’s journey embedded in the surface of an artwork – the traces she leaves behind, how she moves and manipulates form. In these three small works, Jones’s curiosity unfolds.

Walks are microcosms of life, on which you observe and discover things and encounter obstacles while getting a sense of your place in the world. Jones articulates this idea through scale, material, and composition in a way that, quite purposefully, doesn’t quite resolve. It’s through this restrained openness that she allows the rest of the world in, sometimes framing the gallery or letting unexpected light shape her forms. She makes a new world, but interactively, involving both the space and the viewer. It’s a quietly joyful reality I am grateful to carry with me on my own walks, as shared and as fragile as it may be.

“Jilaine Jones: A Walk with D. Ann,” 15 Orient, 72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY. Through February 22,2025.

About the author: David Whelan is a painter living in Brooklyn. He has published art reviews in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Effects Journal, among other publications.