Jonathan Jones’s work is often elliptical but always thought-provoking in its approach to the ways that Indigenous cultural heritage is experienced in contemporary life.

untitled (domestic heads or tails) cannot be taken at the face value of its title. Characteristically, Jones alludes to an earlier image of Aboriginal occupation of the land, as curator Stephen Gilchrist explains: ‘The cylindrical objects which comprise Jones’s installation untitled (heads or tails) 2009 mirror the truncated forms of de-stumped marayanang or scar trees’.

This work was inspired by an image of Tasmanian Aboriginal people made by an artist on one of the early French exploration voyages in 1792–93. For Jones, trees have a certain emotional reticence that allows one to consider not only the past but the future: as Gilchrist notes:

A scar is suggestive of both wound and repair, and Jones’s installation pivots on this poetic dichotomy.