What: Australian artist Jonathan Jones
Where: Tim Melville Gallery, 2 Kitchener St, to April 10.
Bathed in the light from his wall-filling sculpture of fluorescent tubes at the Tim Melville Gallery, the Australian artist Jonathan Jones tells an insightful story. When Governor Phillip was establishing Sydney in the late 18th century, the survey measure of a town was the number of its brick buildings. But because Sydney lacked a natural source of lime to mix with mortar, it had none.
"So they were obsessed with getting bricks up and all they could do was dig up the [Aboriginal] middens to get the lime out. All those old shells hold the houses of Old Sydney Town together," he says.
"I got interested in the idea that there are seams of commonality holding the bricks together to formulate Sydney's identity. People always talk about Aboriginal history as being separate - and yet here was something integrated and holding the fabric of Sydney together."
As an Aboriginal artist - albeit one whose allusive, emotionally cool and minimalist work eschews the overly familiar dot painting or traditional bark art, and the political polemics of some - Jones has his work locate the invisible and the suggested, the spaces between overt meaning, and deep history.
His anecdote is emblematic of how much of his thinking and work with light (and his drawings) explores cultural and philosophical space, yet offers surfaces and images which can be read from multiple perspectives.
"I like the idea of not being too prescriptive and more suggestive, that everyone can take something to a work."
Sometimes what others bring has informed him in unexpected ways. He tells of an old carver who, admiring the white geometrical patterns of his fluorescent work, said when people once carved shields they would rub them with white ochre which would become embedded in the grooves.
"So the actual design would be in white. No one of our generation has ever seen one of those objects finished with white ochre - but that was his connection to the work and pushed it back into a more original context."
Sydney-based Jones - whose works are in Australia's National Gallery in Canberra, the state galleries of New South Wales and Victoria as well as private and corporate collections - was drawn to working with light because the material was readily available, but more so when a beloved auntie died.
At that time he was working with multiples and wanted to create something in which the separate elements were united.
"The introduction of light was a way that could happen, there were these shiny metal things and when they were spot-lit they acted as one. There was this referencing of my auntie and holding collective memory together, so she was there but not - and while there was no tangible evidence [the individual elements] were connected [by light]".
Born in 1978 of Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri heritage, Jones grew up moving between relatives' houses near Tamworth and in Sydney: "One of those kids ignored enough that could get away with jumping between two places."
At his auntie's insistence he studied at a TAFE ("English for First Australians or something, maths for idiots, and an art component", he laughs) and went to the University of New South Wales on an Aboriginal entry scheme. He graduated in 1999 by which time he had exhibited in several group shows.
Self-effacing and aware of the many agendas which can attend any contemporary Aborigine, he has been accused sometimes of not using his position as a cultural ambassador or to be "screaming about the problems".
"But even if you are screaming at someone they're not necessarily going to walk away with what you've screamed. For some, Aboriginal art should be a vehicle for much more aggressive stances if you are lucky enough to get an audience, and most Aboriginal artists don't."
While he understands the argument to "forcefully educate", he has been surrounded by supportive artists whose careers have allowed him to work in the way he chooses.
" Every show I've been in someone peddles something new about you, but it doesn't bother me if someone picks up another reference [as] opposed to an Aboriginal one."
His drawings at the Tim Melville Gallery - like minimalist Suprematist work or elegantly spare abstracts - have a backstory like the mortar of Old Sydney Town. His light sculptures draw symbolically on unifying disparate fields into a whole and the geometric patterns on Aboriginal weaponry.
While in Northern India he became curious about salt production, because his family comes from near the progressively salinating and "seriously compromised" Murray River.
Tracing Gandhi's steps on the 1930 march against the salt tax, Jones discovered salt is now mostly sold to chemical plants, used for weapons manufacture, and in the building industry. His drawings reflect his mapping of how salt has gone into this other world and the salt in the Murray, and they allude to light on the floor of temples, Gandhi's revolution and how the land is turning on itself: "The most productive area of Australia will soon die or not be in existence. They are little maps so reductive they become anything."
And so goes the thinking and art of Jonathan Jones, taking the long view back and forward, alluding across time and space and cultures, locating unity in the seemingly separate, and illuminating the spaces between light from a fluorescent tube or white space on paper.
