Heather Jones is an interdisciplinary feminist artist whose current practice is centered around textiles and their relationship to motherhood, matrilineal connections, and hidden histories. Working with cotton and thread, Jones constructs sublime sewn paintings and large-scale draped wall sculptures that defy the limits of their own materiality. Steeped in the visual language of American Patchwork and Quilting, Abstract Expressionism, and Color Field Painting, Jones’ works push the boundaries of their medium, occupying the generative spaces between fine art and craft, painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, non-objective and representational.

Jones uses abstraction and color to create sewn paintings and sculptures that comment on the historical and socio-political relationships between women and textiles and explore matrilineal connections, gender, place, time, and culture. In her process-driven practice she employs techniques typically associated with craft to document the story of our current world, particularly female narratives that are often neglected from history. Working within the realm of geometric compositions she creates a universal visual language to tell these stories, using textiles as a reference to issues of domesticity and women’s work. Her practice continues the story of geometric abstraction inherent to patchwork found in the Southern and Appalachian regions of the United States, home to many of her ancestors, and her work is rooted in the history of American quilt making and a vast group of unknown female makers. Conceptually her work focuses on feminist ideals; the use of readymade, common material and its elevation to high art; the power and emotion of color and shape; and is an authentic connection to the past, both personally and universally.

Jones was selected as an artist-in-residence for Kehinde Wiley’s inaugural class at Black Rock Senegal, and worked there in 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely at national and international venues, most recently at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; the Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; and at the Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, paired with the work of Odili Donald Odita and Jeffrey Gibson. Her work has been acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art, the Speed Art Museum, Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest, Germany; the Chicago Blackhawks, Chicago, Illinois; Fidelity Investments, Boston, Massachusetts; Churchill Asset Management, the Seagram Building, New York, New York; the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio; the Sara and Michelle Vance Waddell Collection, Cincinnati, Ohio; as well as many other private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Jones’ first book, Quilt Local: Finding Inspiration in the Everyday was released in October 2015 by STC Craft, an imprint of Abrams, New York.

A native Cincinnatian, Jones studied art history at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning, earning both a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts (ABT). She currently lives outside of Cincinnati, Ohio on a small farm with her husband and two children.