Jonathan Jones: untitled (domestic heads or tails)
July 2010
The motif of light, and the notion of ‘shining a light' on emotinally and politically difficult subjects, is a major feature of Jonathan Jones's work. untitled (domestic heads or tails) 2009 was inspired by an historical image of Tasmanian Aboriginal people made by an artist on one of the early French exploration voyages in 1792–93. This is best known in the engraving of 1817 by Jacques-Louis Copia (1764–99) showing a group of Aboriginal people fishing beside a river, with a fallen scar tree in the mid ground. For Jones, this was evidently the start of a train of associations that became emblematic of the fate of many Australian Aboriginal people, but his remembering that tree has a certain emotional reticence that allows one to consider not only the past but also the future.
