Output details

“The warriors of 5-12(5-1-2 = wo-yao-ai) - “I want to be loved / I want to love someone.” Abstract sculptural installation using 150 locally produced industrial ceramic pipes and brick, which are manipulated by hand into a linear grouping, exploring tensions of uniformity and human individuality.

Brief Description

Jones investigated the juxtaposition of industrial and manual production with regard to metaphors of alienation and disenfranchisement. Jones was invited to create work, and to select and curate a group of British artists, for the permanent collection of the British Pavilion of the new International Ceramic Museum, Flicam, Fuping, Shaanxi Province, China. Jones gained funding from the Arts Council England to support the exhibition.

Research Rationale

The warriors of 5-12 represented the first opportunity for Jones to work in China and within the confines of a ceramic factory. It enabled him to research the embodied narratives of the alienation of industrialisation, in both West and East, in addition to the history of Chinese ceramics, in his work. Jones’ installation employs original production pieces from the Fu Le factory and manually altered elements which were fired within the factory’s continuous production kilns to represent the alienated labour of workers and the disenfranchised condition of his grandparents’ generation in the Nazi camps. Inspired by the strong ethical and political dimension of Ai Wei Wei’s work, Jones however insists on the use of craft skill to re-instate lost humanity symbolically.

Strategies Undertaken

The warriors of 5-12 critically examines the relationship between “the Readymade” and the hand-formed. The tall, marked pipes, appropriated from the factory production, were marked with cuts. The hand marking symbolically re-instates humanity to the metaphoric, alienated figures in the installation. The elements were fired with the factory production, in the various kilns, suggesting connotations of mass production/alienation, as well as of permanence and memorial. The elements were organised to reference the ‘Terracotta Warriors’ of the Qin emperor, T.S. Eliot’s “crowds” of Modernism and roll-calls at the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.