Untitled (bird on wheel)
Tony JONES: artist
When Jones started to make small-scale sculptures in the late 1970s, casting in bronze was not commonly practised in Perth. What particularly excited Jones about bronze casting was the process of working through a traditional medium to achieve a new, as yet unknown, outcome. Jones started with wax casts of many of the elements of the sculptures, enjoying the fact that the malleability of wax enabled the smooth joining of the distinct parts into a new whole. This sculpture brings together casts of found items with imagery drawn from unrelated objects, it is an odd fusion of the animal and the mechanical as the bird, perched on a wheel like a circus performer on a monocycle, metamorphoses into a plane. As with the Surrealists before him, Jones conjures into being an unsettling image from his subconscious simply through the unexpected conjunction of items from our everyday world. Strangely, it is the small scale which enables this sculpture to open our minds to the large world of the imagination.
Title
Untitled (bird on wheel)
Artist/Maker and role
Tony JONES: artist
Date
1980
Medium
bronze on marble base
Measurements
27.1 x 19.5cm x 11.2 cm
12.4 x 8.5 cm (diameter base)
12.4 x 8.5 cm (diameter base)
Credit line
Gift of Dr Rose Toussaint, 1994
The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia
Accession number
1994/0200