Ruth Kathryn Jones
Ruth Kathryn Jones is is an artist, independent curator and director of The Old Waterworks, an artist led charity and studios in Southend, Essex.
Her practice and research operate at the intersection of feminism and world-building to offer audiences opportunities to image the world otherwise. She works across installation, sound, drawing and sculpture and ASMR to engage audiences.
Her current research, Teratoma/Terror Incognita, has provoked a series of different proposals, works and texts exploring embodied glitches and ruptures as sites for agency and possibility.
Ruth Jones (b 1980 Essex, UK) founded the Agency of Visible Women, an intersectional, feminist artist network in 2017. In 2022 she was awarded a British Council Venice Fellowship. She was awarded a residency with arts organisation Metal in 2021, a sound commission with Focal Point Gallery in 2022, and graduated from University of East London with a doctorate in fine art in 2023. She currently collaborates on the alternative post-graduate programme Future Ruins and New Worlds with artist Dr. David Watkins.
Artist Statement
My current research, Teratoma/Terror Incognita, has provoked a series of different works and texts exploring embodied glitches and ruptures as sites for agency and possibility.
Teratoma’s are reproductive cells that have mutated to form a tumour and can contain teeth, hair, muscle and bone. They refuse to function as those cells normally would, suggesting cellular agency, a bodily glitch. As if our genes refuse the way our bodies have been constituted under capitalism, as productive labourers.
Terra Incognita refers to the unknown and unexplored territory of the female body, and the teratoma represents an interloper within that territory.
Thinking with the bodies we love so dearly, disrupted as they are by numerous interlopers, serves as an exercise in re-conceptualising our futures as personal, collective, and interconnected endeavours.
When our bodies have glitched of their own accord, polluted and pollinated by influences, systems and synthesis, mutated and turned – we might experience a dislocation; from what was expected of us and by us. What lies in this dislocated rupture? A possibility to see and imagine the future differently.
My work stems from this, in large scale drawings, clay and paper sculptures, video sketches and ASMR sound pieces with BSL interpretation.
Work
Photo: Ruth Jones
Photo: Ruth Jones
Photo: Ruth Jones
Film & Video
'The Build' 2025. A multi-layered ASMR audio guided visualisation of imagining a new world. British Sign Language translation by Frances Everingham is edited to match the rhythmic, layered flow of the audio. 'The Maintenance' 2025. A multi-layered audio about the repetitive and endless chore of maintaining our world. British Sign Language translation filmed and edited in such a way as to try to capture the feeling of the overlapping and intense overwhelming sound. BSL translation by Frances Everingham.
