Awkward Beauty: Lucy Jones
£ 40.00
Overview
Marking the occasion of a self-portrait by Lucy Jones being featured in Costume Art, the inaugural exhibition of the Costume Institute's new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, we are delighted to highlight a selection of further self-portraits by the artist.
Some of these paintings are quite confrontational because I want people to confront not just me, but I'm commenting on disability. I'm also commenting on unseen disabilities like dyslexia or depression. I often write on them using a mirror image of the writing, so it makes it quite difficult for people to read, because I want to make it awkward for the viewer to understand the painting completely.
Recognised as one of the most distinct voices in contemporary self-portraiture, British artist Lucy Jones's raw and revealing self-portrayals are both personal and politically-charged. Born with cerebral palsy, Jones addresses themes of femininity, ageing, observation, and disability, challenging societal perceptions of difference while reflecting on her own inner dialogues.
Many of the works in the selection below have been highlighted in features within The Guardian, The Observer, CNN, and on the Talk Art podcast.
Costume Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This powerful self-portrait by Lucy Jones is featured in Costume Art. In a section dedicated to the disabled body, the piece is in dialogue with fashion by Willie Norris, modelled by Aariana Rose Philip.
“In fashion, the disabled body has long been relegated to the periphery, subject to regimes of concealment, correction, and exclusion from critical aesthetic discourse. Challenging this entrenched silence, this section brings fashion into dialogue with the lived experiences of its creators and wearers, whose practices are shaped by physical, sensory, and cognitive diversity.” Exhibition text from Costume Art, The Disabled Body.
Costume Art runs 10 May 2026 – 10 January 2027 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
A further self-portrait, shown below, is featured in the exhibition publication Costume Art, by Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton.
“The artist Lucy Jones also demands unapologetic presence in her self-portrait on page 222. Jones—who, like Philip, lives with cerebral palsy—portrayed herself on all fours to evoke the memory of her three-year-old self learning to crawl, a moment captured in the painting's upper-right corner. This vulnerability advances a sociopolitical intervention that shifts the viewer's gaze from one that sees a disabled body subject to clinical scrutiny to one that perceives a sovereign subject of historical agency and self-authorship.” From Costume Art, 2026, by Andrew Bolton. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Selected Works
ABOUT LUCY JONES (b. 1955)
British artist Lucy Jones is renowned for her raw, wild landscapes and distinctively provocative portraits, characterised by expressive abstract brushwork and vibrant colour. Balancing an intricate rendering of line and space in her landscapes with the powerful simplicity of her portraits, Jones's paintings conduct a journey through both interior landscapes and the external world beyond.
Through Jones' revealing and defiant portrayal of her own body, she addresses ideas of femininity, fragility, ageing, and disability. These paintings, both personal and political, highlight society's way of viewing difference in others. The artist, who was born with cerebral palsy, has faced the frustrations of her disability over-crowding people's perceptions of her by using her defiant ferocity, vulnerability and wry sense of humour, turning the attention back onto the viewer. While the rhythmical landscape paintings tend to be intricately detailed, the figures in Jones's portraits, which are almost life-sized, are framed by dense voids of layered colour, suggesting a physical and three-dimensional backdrop.
In recent years, Jones has also turned her attention to creating portraits of others, approaching her subjects with unflinching honesty and addressing ideas of the self through the unknown interiority of those close to her. Subjects include her husband, her close friend, the sociologist Tom Shakespeare (Tom Shakespeare: Intellect, with Wheels, 2017 is on display in Room 33 at the National Portrait Gallery, London), the sculptor Roger Partridge, and, in 2018, the artist Grayson Perry, in the painting The Seeing Orator, commissioned by The Attenborough Art Centre Collection.
Lucy Jones spends long periods working outside in the landscape, particularly along the borders of England and Wales. The paintings which have arisen from these prolonged engagements respond to the particular sensations of place and the revolving cycles of the seasons. The landscape paintings can also evoke a sense of Jones' own physicality through the visceral energy implied by each mark, evident in the language she uses to describe her process: "grabbing hold" of its essence, and "pinning down" colour. Within each arrangement, memories of space, rhythm and colour are reinvented, beginning with an initial tonal reaction to a pre-coloured ground.
Lucy Jones studied at Camberwell School of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art, where she won a Rome scholarship in 1982. Her work has featured in exhibitions at Cartwright Hall Gallery, Bradford Museum, Bradford; Whitechapel Gallery, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Compton Verney, Warwickshire; Usher Gallery, Lincoln; Salisbury Cathedral. Jones exhibited at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester, (2019), following a commission of a portrait of Grayson Perry to celebrate the Attenborough Arts Centre’s patrons in 2017; and at Christchurch College, Oxford, (2021). In 2021, Lucy Jones won the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize and joined the panel of judges for the 2023 Self Portrait Prize.
Lucy Jones’ work is included in the collections of the Arts Council, London; the National Portrait Gallery, London; Clifford Chance, London; Deutsche Bank AG, London; Government Art Collection, London; Nordstern Collection, Cologne; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. The monograph Lucy Jones: Awkward Beauty was published by Elephant in 2019, featuring essays by Charlotte Jansen, Tom Shakespeare, and Philip Vann.
totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones, 2025. Film by Sam Campbell.