Dione Jones

My body is malleable, the flesh contorts and shifts with every breath. I’m constantly changing. My body and mind sometimes fight for dominance. Stuck in this restrictive flesh vessel.

Masculine? Feminine? I wonder how others see me, my form, my shape, my gender. My gender is my own, no one else’s. Just as yours is your own, too. Manipulating my flesh through materials I choose to capture it on depicts my unrest, fluidity, anger, content, melancholy and everything in the spaces between. Working with materials I can change and change again, using chemicals and other methods, changing one form into another, like how we change, like how I change.

The camera is a mask, a tool I use to play with reality, separating myself from my form and then reconnecting it again. A barrier between myself and my inability to articulate in words the state of my being. Hiding parts, exposing parts, eluding parts. Performing, my body pulled into positions, captured and immortalised. Creating dreamscapes and false realities that do not exist in order to navigate my own reality. Motion and stillness, rest and unrest. Disconnecting my body from myself, the difficulty to feel at home in a body that at times doesn’t reflect how you may see yourself.

My practice is deeply personal, shaped completely by my attempts to bring to life the complicated emotions I have surrounding myself and the world around me. In my attempts I wonder if others find comfort and/or solidarity in my imagery in the same way that I do when I see art that deeply resonates with me. Perhaps someone sees themselves in my work? We create our own meanings. I could tell you word for word what a piece means to me, but I’m also very interested in what it means to you, too.