The green dream

In one of The Lock-Up’s smaller front galleries, an immense nine metre scroll of heavy cotton paper completely dominates the historic police office with its scale, addressing issues of epic proportions with an imposing presence and urgency that belies its delicate, hand-drawn execution.

The work, To bear witness 2024-25, a drawing rendered in ink and Conté by LocustJones cascades from the ceiling, heralded by a chequered red and silver border from which toothlike bullets emerge. Within this ominous frame, three fighter jets flyin formation while skyscrapers tremble and golden sunbursts erupt all around. As events unravel through the panoramic drawing, symbols emerge: helicopter rotor blades, crosses and tortured faces extrude from the rubble, mingling with the network of white veins that map them together in a requiem for souls lost. Veins thread further downward as the timeline unravels and consumes the paper, forming structures and interstices, transforming the scroll into a complex, multicellular organism.

For over 20 years, Locust Jones’ practice has woven layers of stories and images, compulsively appropriating and reinterpreting fragments of world news with reflections on lived experiences. This spontaneous process results in organic, hand-drawn compositions that offer asocial commentary on global politics embedded within his work.

A new commission created during the artist’s residency at The Lock-Up, To bear witness is an example of Jones’ diaristic “timeline drawings” on extensive spans of paper, a mark-making practice in which he records tumultuous life events and the 24-hour international news cycle, or what he calls the “mass media maelström”. New Zealand-born Jones creates these instinctive works in tandem with his daily life, usually from his studio and home in Katoomba. Often inspired by critical events in which personal or global disaster might act as a catalyst, the works are then imbued with his everyday experiences as the artist works and moves through the day and takes his meals around the studio, relishing the spontaneity of a coffee stain or some other such stamp of his routine. Jones uses dates, collage compositions and an ever-flowing stream of consciousness to trace his process. The green dream is a survey of such works, an intimate lens into the artist’s internal landscape, rendered in drawing, painting, photomedia, and sculpture.

Through an open doorway, a haunting soundtrack sets the atmospheric tone. Filmed in a cavernous space at Wollemi National Park and produced with collaborators Rachel Peachey and Paul Mosig, Deep Pass 2021, represents the artist at his most vulnerable and reflective. The montage depicts Jones stripped of his clothes, caked in an array of earthen hues, crouching and clutching as though in a desperate attempt to ground himself. As he wails and shakes in anguish, a whistling gale haunts the core, seemingly out of place in the earthbound vacuum. Enclosed by The Lock-Up’s historic site, the eerie soundscape of Jones’ video echoes the constraints of social structures that haunt the space and the artist’s personal introspection.

In contrast, Jones embraces the storm of information produced by lived experiences, news and current affairs in another time-based work presented in this survey. Hinohara-mura 2024, presents a perspective filmed during a residency with Tokyo University of theArts in the mountains of Hinohara-murawest of Tokyo, a place Jones recalls as “a very beautiful quiet experience”, after the adrenaline rush of the capital. A frenetic drumming rhythm and the artist’s stream of consciousness manifested in spoken word poetry accompanies the meditative visual, a soundtrack collaboration featuring percussionists Tim Bruniges, Dhara Cullen and Darren Seltmann. Arranged around the cell are skull-like ceramic sculptures (RiverStyx 2024-25), some emitting a ghostly red light, which, for the artist, offer a visceral confrontation with morality and the enduring weight of human history.

“And I knew — everyone here knew — that an era of hope, however uneven and misplaced, was about to end.”

– Mujib Mashal, A Journey Through Kabulon the Day of the Fall 2021

In his writing, New York Times correspondent Mujib Mashal describes “taking in the end of one era and the fearful start of another”, as he writes on the eve of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. After decades of violence and cycles of false hope, Mashal laments the despair filling manyAfghans in the face of a dreaded future.Similarly, Uncertain Future 2021, compiles the headlines of its time, incorporating the artist’s firsthand experiences of climate catastrophe, the COVID-19 pandemic, and his research travels in the Middle East.The words and imagery inscribed serve as markers, amongst an almost-blackdeep indigo ink spreading across the paper; the permanence of its sticky gloss binding global timelines and sentiments.Suspended within one of the smallest male cells, Uncertain Future consumes the space and compels viewers into close engagement with its details, a snapshot of a moment in time.

“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.”

– Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes forOur Times 1959

Multifaceted boundaries, both ancient and modern, have shaped and divided human interactions in their construction throughout history. In the late 1950s, the world grappled with several major geopolitical shifts involving the redrawing of borders and violent consequences. Marya Mannes’ poem reflects themes that were central to her work at the time: criticism of political power, human suffering, and moral responsibility. In the neighbouring cell, Hope in a dark era 2021, engages with similar themes. Painted vertically on linen, the work consists of collaged vignettes with text expressing harrowing visions of historical and contemporary conflict informed by imagery from the media and the artist’s first-hand experience inJerusalem, Bethlehem, Gaza and Beirut.In this geometrical composition, Jones positions various politicised figures with their limbs dynamically extended in motion, subjects of multiple scenes bleeding across into another’s realm with each gesture.

The titular work, The green dream 2024, hovers in the company of four other unstretched canvases in the formerExercise Yard; a vibrantly chromatic counterpart in this survey of Locust Jones’ practice. Cubes of recycled hardwood(Ring Cycle 2025) sourced from a local arborist complete the arrangement, inviting viewers to rest upon them and reset, contemplating the interplay of thought and artefact, the private and the public, the ephemeral and the eternal.

Kar Mun Phoon Curator,
The Lock-Up