kerry Jones

Kerry Jones is an artist who studied Fine Art in Hull. Afterwards she lived in London for 10 years and from what she said immersed herself in the world of  the unlawful squatting scene. She's also from her biography said she lived in a truck for a few months and is now settled in the Scottish Borders where she has lived for the last 14 years.

She say’s on her work :

I am a multi - media artist based in Scotland whose practice incorporates film; sound; archive; manipulated still images & site-specific interactions. My recent work comes from an interest in appropriating and deconstructing image, sound and narrative – digital twitches that disrupt time and narrative.Layering elements in anachronistic ways that perhaps result in an audio visual perpetual busyness without any obvious function or narrative.


One of the real opportunity arts she engaged in was at a closed coal factory. She did an installation using turf placed down to highlighted the forgotten and overgrown state of the site. Given the project of the silence that came afterwards!
Kerry got inspired by William Burroughs Cut Up technique of taking a linear text and cutting it up in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. This technique was also styled to the dadaist Tristan Tzara as described in his short text, TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM.  I think the mixed up style and images could definely be close to a dada sense of the eerieness and sinister style on her short films and still cut films.

Other inspirations were 1962 short film La Jetée by Chris Marker. Scottish Borders Memory Bank, and Alchemy Film Festival.

Alchemy Film Festival grows in popularity each year which is great for the small towns and villages in the scottish borders

 Kerry works both as a community artist running Ruffled Feathers and an artist working on her own audio and visual projects. Over the last 3 years these projects have had a focus on ideas of Heritage – most recently facilitating a Pop Up Community Museum in Selkirk.

Her work often involves taking archive photographs and manipulating them with anachronistic insertions of time-travellers and colour.

 One of the community projects used a closed shop in Galashiels to display the children artwork regarding the past history of the town ad the future thoughts highlighting the high street demise.  Her use of mixed-media gave way to the work.  Mixed with sounds of birdsong, horses, and local celebrations and interviews with young people taken from the community arts.... Windows To The Future project was a successful project. The piece resulted in a 30 minute collage of everyday social discourse and curiosity.

"Windows to the Future will show Galashiels in four puppet shows - starting with high street life around the 1900s and finishing with the children's view of how the town's high street will look in the future. I've been living here for only nine years, yet I struggle to remember what the town centre was like before Tesco and Asda. Although this is a fun project it does have a serious message."
She is a sometime DJ and has recently been awarded a South of Scotland Visual Arts award.


I personally could not relate to her videos mixed with puppets and sound. The darkness and eerie time warp style made it to weird for me to watch.

Video's

Swamp Monster – Was a video I watched on vimeo and I was a little unsure about what it was trying to but across.  Female voices all telling the same story of someone’s confession or something. I feel that if it had been a man talking the content would have somehow been more vile. Maybe this was the point.
https://vimeo.com/201053736

The Moving Image Makers Collective - A film by Kezza Jones  was a video I watched that talked about local artist’s meeting and talking about their work as a collective. https://vimeo.com/211470768  The salon’s as they call them believe that by showing work it gives a better sense of what other or how other view the work.




What I did like was how she is always evolving her work and has a good understanding of mixing the arts and community.  Learning the children for the borders project helped the youngsters learn about public performance and set building. I think anything that education’s a child in a positive way of learning is something that should be done more.  For this alone she deserves credit.

She seems very down to earth in a modern racialist sort of way! A person who has lived and felt in some kind of way, connected to following, making connections in a cult / group sense! I don’t know she’s just different!

Overall it was good to meet an artist with different views than the cliques style of artist. Her workings and ability to work with and reach out to the community is I feel a special talent.

Sources of information from website, in person and talk.. pllus Alchemy visits